Balls and Walnuts
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Shenanigans at the Jolliest Roger
A Pirate’s Dilemma, Part the Second
Old Stella had made some peculiar changes to the Roger, I tell ye true. I remember well a time when a seaman like yers truly could grab a pint of grog, settle into one of Stella’s leather-backed chairs, and put his peg up on an oaken barrel. And a fine bar she stocked, arrrr.
I tarried at the threshold. “Stella, what’s become of the place? Where’s me bar? Where’s me fine old leather chairs, and barrel to rest me peg a spell?”
“Times have changed, Cap’n. See that hunk of brass? That’s an espresso machine. Now I can steam milk like the pros –”
“You always steamed my milk like a pro, Stella dear.”
“Kind of you to say, Cap’n. My new clientele likes lots of glass and stainless steel –”
“Avast! What be those plants on the tables, and hanging off yer beams?”
“Calla lilies, Cap’n. And those be ferns.”
“Stella, Stella. What sort of godfersaken house of ill repute are you runnin’ these days? And what be that on the table — malt vinegar? Stella, I like me lasses to smell like lasses –”
But I had no chance to finish, for at that very moment the beauties appeared, floatin’ down the stairs like visions of Earthly delight. Frenchies and Spaniards, jade-bedecked vixens from Cathay and the finest Nubian princesses. “Oooh la la, it’s Captain Morning Wood!” cried one, and “Can I sit on your lap?” cried ‘tother, and “May I please polish your peg leg?” cried a third.
They surrounded yer blighted hero and whisked me to a table. While Stella plied me with her finest rum (she’d saved me a pint, bless her heart), they begged me fer stories of courage and adventure on the high seas. But before long, I came to know their darker purpose.
“Cap’n,” said the Nubian, a fine lass with a high breast, two of them in fact, “is it true you shipped with the legendary Jack Sparrow?”
“Oooh!” the others did cry out in their feminine ecstacies. “You knew Jack Sparrow? What’s he like? Tell me, tell me please!”
“Ay, ’tis true,” I said most mournfully. “I knew Jack Sparrow. I shipped with the Perrier-drinkin’ scoundrel.”
Aye. At last it made sense: the cafe lattes, the calla lilies, the ferns. Jack Sparrow — that bilge-sucking, eyeliner-bogarting blaggard — Jack Sparrow had come to town and fouled me beloved Jolliest Roger.
“Jack Sparrow is not the man ye think he is,” I said to a chorus of soulful moans. “One fact I’ll give ye, one fact to prove that Jack Sparrow is a right poor excuse for a pirate. Here ’tis: that craven swab don’t even know his alphabet like a rum seadog.”
“Huh?” said me gorgeous beauty from Cathay.
“I tell ye true, Mai Poon, or Rita Cosby taint a man. Ol’ Jack Sparrow, he confuses his M’s for his Arrrs.”
“Como?” said Maria of Cordoba.
“Si, si, Maria. One day we made to board one of Her Majesty’s privateers. ‘Look ye, Jack Sparrow,’ I said. ‘Have ye ever seen a stouter mizzenmast?’ ‘Mmmm,’ he replied. Mark ye! A yummy Mmmm, not a right manly Arrrr.”
I gazed upon a sea of beautiful but sadly blank faces, I did.
“That poxy hunk of shark bait wasn’t looking at the mizzenmast, ye sex-addled dames. He was looking at me bosun’s rudder! And by rudder, understand I be speaking metaphorically.”
These flowers of femininity met me revelation with general consternation. I began to fear me willy would stay dry for another long turn at sea, but then Stella arrived, bless her soul.
“Girls, girls! The Cap’n isn’t here for your pleasure.”
Stella’s lasses needed no more encouragement. With a great whoop, they spirited me onto their fine, soft shoulders, and hauled me bodily upstairs to their den of exotic pleasures.
“Fair winds!” cried me good hostess Stella. “And, girls, don’t forget. The Cap’n has been at sea a very long time. Before you get intimate, you had better swab his poop deck!”
Here be yer pirate romance. Arrr.
A Pirates Dilemma, Part the First
Taint easy being grizzled as a cockswain’s dungbie, I tell ye, and me with a leg o’ teak from the knee down. The eye patch don’t help at all, neither. Of late, it seems I can only wet me beak in the back end of a cackle, or in the bunghole of a portside beauty with fewer eyes than me. Imagine me surprise, mates, when I stirred meself one morning and found not one but two beauties casting hopeful eyes on me sorely underused mizzenmast.
But I be gettin’ ahead of meself. Name is Wood, me friends. They calls me Morning Wood, on account o’ I rise before the cock crows and I be barking orders before the sun peeps out her shiny eye. We’d just taken a fine haul, having scuttled Her Majesty’s ship The Drake off the Ivory Coast, and I was of a mind to give me men some much needed shore leave. And, truth be told, I longed for a fine young maiden of indiscriminate tastes to shiver me timbers right well.
We put anchor at the Port of Sassandra. So many bronze beauties lined up at the docks, I figured I had to be in Davy’s grip to be this close to Paradise. Old Stella herself met me at The Blinkered Eye — that be right, Stella of the Ivory Coast’s most famous house o’ ill repute, The Jolliest Roger. Stella had so many rolls of flesh, twas said she could satisfy the whole Spanish Armada with nary a risk to her honor.
“Ahoy, Wood!” she cried. It tickles her fancy to talk like a pirate, it did. “Is that a hornpipe in your pocket, or do you be glad to see me?” Sadly, she ain’t too good at it.
“Darlin’, how would you like a ride on the Cap’n’s Fo’c’s’le?”
“That be a fine proposal, Wood, but I’ll do you one better. I have me some new blood, I do, and I’d be honored if you’d inspect the merchandise.”
“Inspect the merchandise? What do you take me for, woman, a common water-clerk? I be here to find meself a good time –“
Old Stella sighed. “I meant, how would you like to get laid? Really laid? Not just a roll in the hay with my pet sheep.”
I was as stunned as if I’d been clogged on the head by sodden oar.
“You mean it, woman? A real dame, one of the human persuasion?”
“Two X chromosomes and all, Cap’n.”
That one went over me head, but I liked the sound of it all the same.
Formication
Subtitle: We be schleppin’ spiders
formication
An abnormal sensation as of insects running over or into the skin, associated with cocaine intoxication or disease of the spinal cord and peripheral nerves.
Why it pays to go to a board certified ear, nose, and throat doctor
Meanwhile, over at Chelicera, Karen reviews the gruesome history of the Mississippi Flood of 1927. (Don’t freak over the title. She’s being sarcastic. Or ironic. One of those.)
Those who don’t remember history are condemned to repeat it, right?
D.
The fundamental frequency of guy thought
From Monica Jackson’s blog, The Way There:
“Okay, tell me the truth. Do you ever go to the grocery store or somewhere like that, and count the guys you’d possibly sleep with in a ratio to the ones who are ick, and work it out mathematically—and figure out when is the highest likelihood of the greatest concentration of fuckable men at particular grocery store at any one time?”
Thank you for asking this question, Monica. Why? Cuz I never would have guessed that women think this way. Guys, yes. Beginning at puberty, sex never leaves our brains (except for a thirty minute interval after each orgasm).
Quien es mas lindo?
One Saturday afternoon in 1982, I watched The Sting with Karen and her two roommates, Kira and Suzie.
“So,” I said, “who is cuter, Newman or Redford?”
Take a moment to answer that one for yourself. Even if you’re a guy. Especially if you’re a guy, cuz the point of this exercise . . . well, hell, let’s not get too pedantic just yet. Guys? Ask your wife this question. Try to predict what she’ll answer.
I figured it had to be Newman. Those blue eyes, that chiseled facial bone structure. (Great bones do it for me every time. I still have wood with Lauren Bacall’s name on it.) But, no. All three picked Redford.
Even then, twenty-two years ago, Redford had a white raisin thing going. And now look at the two of them.
Newman first.
It still baffles me, this question of what women find attractive or unattractive in certain men. Miss Snark has femwood for George Clooney. Maureen’s nipples go stiff over Al Pacino. Meanwhile, the Bitches keep ripping on poor Fabio. (See, Beth? I worked in a Fabio reference!)
This question is important to me, since I enjoy writing strong female characters. These female leads have been mutant parakeets and giant spiders, but eventually I mean to get back to Homo sapiens. When I do, I’d better have a grip on the feminine mystique.
So, help me out, y’all. Here are some pairings of famous duos. Tell me who is cuter and why. To keep from prejudicing things, I’ll save my opinions until the end.
Say what?
During my second year of ear, nose, and throat residency at LA County Hospital, one of our chiefs (call him el Jefe) did a study on ear foreign bodies. Very simple study: he reported on the first one hundred ear foreign body patients to walk in our clinical door. It took el Jefe only three months to rack up 100 cases. If you’re easily grossed out or still have nightmares of the Night Gallery earwig episode, skip the next paragraph.
The number one foreign body? Not earwigs, but Blatella germanica, the German cockroach. But don’t freak out. LA County Hospital’s patient population can’t be generalized to the world at large.
Here’s my favorite ear foreign body story. No bugs.
“Why are you putting rocks in your ears?” I said in my not-half-bad Spanish. “Little children put rocks in their ears. You’re an adult. What’s the matter with you?”
What is this damned thing? I thought as I looked at his ear under the binocular microscope. White. Hard. Wedged in pretty tight.
“I can’t believe it,” I said, still in Spanglish. “A grown man putting a rock in his ear. What were you thinking?”
My patient started talking a mile a minute to my nurse’s aide, and he started laughing.
“No, Dr. Hoffman. Not a rock. A rock of cocaine.”
Aha. Well, that explained it. (In case you’re thinking Huh? These folks stuff the rock in their ear when they think they might get busted.) This solved my problem, though. I irrigated his ear with alcohol, dissolving the rock.
My patient was not a happy camper. He’d expected to get the rock back.
My attending physician asked me to do a pelvic exam on a sixteen-year-old girl with vaginal discharge. “It’s her first pelvic,” my boss said, “but don’t worry. From the sound of it, she’s been very active.”
So what if she’s sexually active, I thought. This is her very first pelvic exam . . . it’s bound to be stressful. I vowed to put her at ease by speaking slowly and calmly, doing my best to reassure her and let her know this was all very routine, nothing to be afraid of. I’d tell her in great detail what I was about to do before I did it.
After explaining to her the general idea of what we needed to do, I held up my gloved and lubed hand, my index and middle fingers standing at attention like proud little soldiers, and said,
“Voy a poner dos piernas en su vajina.”
To save you from having to Babelfish that one:
“I’m going to put two legs in your vagina.”
Ever hear the expression bug eyes? We somehow managed to sort out the misunderstanding, and to her credit, she let me go ahead with the exam.
And, yes, I used my fingers.
D.
The place to be
Humans are meme* sponges, and none are spongier than children. In first grade, I got infected by the fame meme. I vanted to be a star.
If only Cintra Wilson had been a playmate on my street; she might have inoculated me against the fame virus. As it was, I fell under Hollywood’s spell. I saw a want ad in the TV guide for child actors and I bit.
When I was four or five, I spontaneously broke into song at our local pizza parlor, where they had a real live piano man. I belted out “Home on the Range”; I was the original karaoke maven. (My wife would call it budding exhibitionism, and she’d be right. Hmm. Exhibitionism. Isn’t that what blogging is all about?) Bottom line, I loved having an audience.
As I recall, I got a job from my first casting call, a major role in James Whitmore’s upcoming TV series, My Friend Tony (January to September, 1969). If you follow that link, you’ll learn the following:
When he was in Italy shortly after the end of World War II, John Woodruff was almost pick-pocketed by a very young street hood named Tony. Years later, a fully grown Tony arrived in America to join John as half of a private-investigation team.
I was that very young street hood! See? I’ll bet you always wondered where you’d seen me before.
I only had to do one thing for this role: pick James Whitmore’s pocket. I recall that Whitmore was a royal creep who couldn’t be bothered to learn my name (I was ‘the kid’). I also recall that in the story boards for my scene, everything appeared in silhouette. I figured the drawings had to be in silhouette because the director hadn’t met me yet and didn’t know what I looked like.
When the show finally aired, the whole family watched it. There I was in the opening credits — where I would be week after week for the show’s whole run — a tiny silhouette in the uppermost fifth of the screen trying to pickpocket a slightly larger silhouette.
Fame. But it got better. Before long, I would find myself sitting nearly naked in Eva Gabor’s lap.
You know, I’ve always wondered why I can’t ever manage to catch MY episode of Green Acres on television. The answer is easy: six seasons, 170 episodes. As best I can tell, mine is episode 145, “The City Kids”.
Here’s my Green Acres insider FAQ. Since the kids at school only ever asked me two questions, this will be short.
Q: Did you meet Arnold the Pig?
A: No, I did not get to meet Mr. the Pig.
Q: So I bet you think you’re pretty cool, huh?
A: Well, yes, actually —
Q: Dontcha, punk, ya little shit —
A: Okay, the Q&A is over now . . .
For Green Acres, my role required that I run around the Douglases’ living room with a giant candle holder and get myself stuck up the Douglases’ chimney. (Is there something oddly phallic about that, or is it just me?) Once I’m stuck up the chimney, the other kids tug on my legs to pull me out, and they pull off my pants by accident. When they finally get me out, my face is all smudged with soot.
Hmm. Are you laughing yet?
After the director got himself a satisfying take, I ran off the set. My main thought was to get my pants back, but Eva Gabor intercepted me, plopped me on her lap, cooed madly at me, and tried to wipe my face clean.
My mother was no help at all. She was so ecstatic to find me giving Eva Gabor a lap dance that she hung about, basking in Eva’s starlight, gushing how much she loved her in Gigi.
I’d really, really like to say I grabbed myself a bit of stellar action, a fistful of Hooterville Hooters, as it were, but sadly, I was embarrassed as hell sitting half-naked in some strange woman’s lap. Yet another example of me passing up an opportunity to score.
So: did I go on to become the youngest Brady? Did I get to play Eddie’s father’s son, or the littlest Munster? No, although I could have become a model for the star of MTV’s The Head:
Yup, I became a nine-year-old creep, a genuine prick. Couldn’t understand why the other kids weren’t as impressed with me as I was.
I may be misremembering this, but I think the camel-back-breaking straw came the day our teacher announced that a boy in one of the other first grade classes had died in a dune buggy accident. I waved my hand, and when the teacher pointed to me, I said, “Well, at least he’ll get his name in the newspaper.”
Based on that, my parents decided that this fame thing had gone a bit too far. That was the end of my acting career, except for my starring role in our first grade class’s production of Chicken Little.
Weird thing is, I never really missed it.
D.
*”Memes are the basic building blocks of our minds and culture, in the same way that genes are the basic building blocks of biological life.” – from Meme Central.
Better definition: memes are infectious thoughts or ideas. “Blueberries are blue” is not a meme. “M-m-m-my-Sharona” is (if you hum it and get other folks to hum it, too). Courage is not a meme, but a code of chivalry is. Religion is the Typhoid Mary of memes.
P.S.: Bare Rump is back. I thought about having her meet up with Seymore Butts on his casting couch (what — you don’t think Seymore would be interested in a hot new actress named Bare Rump?) but Karen says Bare Rump has too much integrity to appear in a porno. Ergo, Bare Rump’s Diary remains PG-13 (weeeell, occasionally R) for the time being.
Sociobiology of Boobage 101
In 1983, Vincent Sarich taught a course at Berkeley called “The Evolution of Human Behavior.” He let us know on the first day that the class was experimental. He had some rough ideas about course content — some things he wanted to talk about, a handful of ideas he wanted to share.
Sounded like good clean fun, and we really did have a blast, too. Professor Sarich (that grizzly teddy bear on the left) was good to his word. He talked, we listened — and argued with him, of course.
For a final exam, he asked us to write three short essays on topics of our own choosing. They had to be somewhat relevant to the course, but beyond that, we were on our own. My three topics:
Genius, a maladaptive trait
Why are hiccups contagious?
The Road Warrior: a sociobiologic perspective
I got an A+.
Funny thing, though. I’ve only retained two things from that class. One is a concept: the Tragedy of the Commons (see the Wikipedia article here, or the original article here), which suggests that folks will always choose their own self interest over the common good, even to their ultimate detriment. If you’re curious about this, I recommend you start with the Wiki article, since it is shorter than the original article and has considerably more perspective.
The other thing I learned in Professor Sarich’s class is why men love cleavage. “I want to talk about breasts today,” he said, except that with his slight speech impediment it came out “breashts.” “Why are they so appealing?”
The traditional sociobiological interpretation is that large breasts are desirable because they translate to well fed babies. Sociobiology was big back then. Still is, for all I know. In case you’re unfamiliar with it, here’s the basic idea. Our behavior is ruled by our genes, and in particular, our genes’ desire to pass on more of themselves to the next generation. “But,” you argue, “genes are not sentient.” Pshaw! Genes don’t have to be sentient to find ways of furthering their own interests.
Back to boobs. Professor Sarich contended that the sociobiologists were wrong. Men don’t love breasts because they want well fed babies. Men crave hooters because of a cross-wiring problem. You see, men get boobs confused with butts:
always gave me wood.
It’s gotta be true.
D.
I am Bluestar.
Yea, though we duggest ourselves a mighty hole of debt, we compromised not for our killer range. Meet the 36″ RNB Bluestar, the primo bitchenest 36″ range on the planet. “Largest oven capacity available on a 36″ range; the most powerful burner available, 22,000 BTU; accomodates a full-size commercial 18″ x 26″ baking sheet; 24″ depth.”
This range is for a real kitchen where a real man is gonna cook, not one of those poofy, “Oh, look how rich I am!” show kitchens. Hot enough to transmute base metals into gold, durable enough to survive wormhole travel; and it gives sensual massages, too.
Today we checked the status of the Money Pit and saw, in the middle of our torn-up living room floor, Our Precious, still wrapped in her factory plastic, a smug vision of culinary voluptuousness. “I am Bluestar,” she whispered. “Thirty years from now, when you’re still working nights in the ER to pay off your quintuple mortgage, you’ll come home and see me, every bit as beautiful and functional as I am today, and you’ll know it has all been worthwhile.”
“I’ve been burned before,” I said. “Say you won’t hurt me like the others.”
“You know I can’t promise you that.”
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even see straight.
“I’ll burn you worse than any woman has ever burned you before,” she continued. “You know I will. But I can promise you one thing: I’ll always be here for you.”
“You will?”
“You gorgeous man: as long as I have gas in my pipes, I’ll be the hottest thing you’ve ever touched. My love for you will never cool.”
And, somehow, those words made it all worthwhile.
D.