It seems like all we do on this page anymore is to apologize for not keeping up to date and blogging as usual, like last year. We have even gotten a warning from Amazon.com that if we do not post another blog, we shall no longer be published on the Kindle page there, so let us explain.

The novel, Egypt Cemetery, is a trip through the childhood of Michael Hendricks (yes, Hendricks), as seen by the author, as far back into the 1950s as he can recollect and taking him up to the sad year of 1971, by which time JFK, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, along with the ‘hippie scene,’ were all dead.

It is a story, it is a purging of the soul, it is what kids did back when kids were allowed to be kids and grown-ups were still allowed to yell at strange kids whenever they saw them up to something wrong.

Today, if you yell at a strange kid for riding his bike into traffic and nearly killing himself without realizing it, it is as good as starting a Third World War. Parents do not care if the kids are safe. They just do not want you to yell at them.

When we were kids, we got yelled at everyplace we went. Sometimes we got chased. Somebody was always after us, one way or the other. We did other things back then, besides get yelled at, that the youth of today will never have the opportunity to experience…like making crank phone calls. The closest you can get to that today is watching Bart Simpson make a fool out of Moe over the phone at Moe’s Bar on The Simpsons.

Nobody asks if you have Prince Albert in a can anymore, of if your refrigerator is running. All the fun has been stymied in the wake of caller ID. There is no more fun anonymity. There is no more good music on the AM radio. Monsters are no longer scary.

Today, a big issue is bullying. When we were kids, it was a free for all, as to who could heap the worst insult onto the next kid. If you got insulted, you shot back. We actually used to purchase ‘insult cards’ at the price of 25 insults for a dime. They were the size of business cards and said things like, “Get rid of 20 pounds of ugly fat…cut off your head!”…of “Its nice to see your back…especially after seeing your face.”

There was a whole industry devoted to helping us insult each other. Another good one was to take the theme song from a currently-popular television show and insert the name of your victim into it, while adding assorted rhyming jibes to the tune of the ditty. Or take the case of the poor unfortunates who were marked from the start just by the spelling of their last names…like Randy Nipples, who was doomed to a life of saying, “It is ‘Nip-PELS!” Sure we had our fun with his name but we played together, too.

The message is that childhood has changed. It is not as much fun…or it does not look it, anyway. In many ways, we are glad to be considered ‘old’, since the new world is not as much fun as the old one. In Egypt Cemetery, the author tries to present those innocent days of youth, before everything had a double meaning and things were what they appeared to be. It is not exotic, it is not earth shattering, it is not politically correct…it is the way it was before the internet robbed us of everything from regional dialects to colloquialisms to regional pride. We are all one big country now. We are all starting to sound the same. In the sixties, you could tell where a person came from as soon as they spoke. Not any more…even the charming and warm southern accent is fading, and that is a shame.

The cemetery pictured above is actually the cover photo for the book, taken by the author in County Tipperary, Ireland. His love of cemeteries began at with the Egypt Cemetery in Podunk, Pennsylvania.

Mr. Hendrick is an integral part of the writing staff here at CFYSA and we look forward to his return in July, or maybe even in June, once he has finished all the editing and writing of the novel. If you are hungry for some new work from him, you can get a copy of Beatdom Issue 11 ~ The Nature Issue. You can enjoy the front cover he conceived of Arthur Rimbaud (painstakingly drawn by the back-from-the-dead fingers of illustrator Waylon Bacon) or look at the tables of contents, which he photographed at two places which are very dear to him, his local library and the raptor sanctuary, where he has been a volunteer for fourteen years.

On the back cover, you can see the cover of Egypt Cemetery, as it will be published, and inside you can read interviews he conducted with Beat writer Ann Charters, country music legend Hank3 and punk rocker Richie Ramone, who was the fastest drummer in the fastest of the original punk bands. He also recently conducted an interview with punk icon Patti Smith, which will appear in Issue Number Twelve of Beatdom…The Crime Issue. Part of that interview is posted on www.beatdom.com .

So hold onto your hats and the fun will begin again soon enough. We just need Michael here to inspire us with some of his insane views that somehow seem to make sense in an insane world. He is almost done with the hard work and misses his readers very much.

He says we should say, “Hello!”

We crawl out of our hole to post again, it being closer to Spring and we having things on our mind.

Thank you for your repeated visits over the past months and keeping this blog going with your reading. We have been involved in setting up a new online book and vinyl shop, called The Used Beat Book Shop and it is online at http://www.usedbeatshop.com , although it is still under construction in the capable hands of the folks at SONA (not Sony) Entertainment.

You can click on the url to see about that one…but today we want to chat about chicks…chickens, that is and why they should be set free. It is all allegorical and not a reality, as it would appear in real life as shown in the cartoon here by Gilbert Shelton, writer and artist of such wonderful comix as The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and his work in Zap, Rip-Off and other higher-grade underground comix. They are, ahem, available at The Used Beat Book Shop and will be online with prices attached one day very soon. Keep looking!

Anyway, Bob Dylan and Sony have chickens they ought to release in the form of the Supper Club tapes, two nights of live performances in the NYC venue by Dylan in November 1993. These are excellent performances of many songs which have become staples to Dylan fans and have never been heard in live or alternate takes. In some cases these live versions are more touching than the originally-released recordings.

Many of them have been popping up on Youtube and then taken down by the record company after a few days. It would be nice to have a copy of the songs on a cd, perhaps as the next volume in the official Bootleg Series, but fact is the performances were professionally filmed and recorded and would be a wonderful treat for fans around the world!

To this end, a Facebook group has formed to push a petition, the page is called Petition To Convince Sony & Bob Dylan to Release the Supper Club Tapes. It is gaining ground with more people signing the petition every day. They need you to sign. You need to sign, if you would like to have these great performances available to you and not ‘here today and yanked from the web tomorrow’, as has been happening with them.

A lot of excellent songs and new versions of the standards are found here, like Tight Connection To My Heart, Ring Them Bells, Jack-A-Roe, Ragged and Dirty, Blood In My Eyes and others.

It does not take much to sign the petition, just go to FaceBook and copy the name of the group from this blog onto the search bar and, Hey! Presto!, there it is. It is that easy, so please do it and we can all have these to play in our cars or watch on our screens at some time in the near future.

Again, we thank you for supporting this blog. We thank you for checking in every day, all those of you who know who you are, whether for kind or nefarious purposes - we welcome you all!

The Used Beat Book Shop will be up and running soon…we have so much inventory it is a monumental task just to scan it all and figure the proper price. You can sell stuff there, too, and if you look at the site you will notice that details about that are shown near the bottom of the page. There will be no fee or charges. It is a community service to an underground community. www.usedbeatshop.com

In the meantime, we are plugging away on the next issue of Beatdom. This issue, your humble narrator has managed to get interviews with Ann Charters, noted Beat Historian, and Hank3, the grandson of Hank Williams (arguably the father of country music and, according to Hank3, maybe the father of rock and roll). For details on that, see www.beatdom.com

Allow us to entertain you with one of the songs from the Supper Club tapes. This is a great version of Tight Connection To My Heart, a song that a lot of people write off but which is a favorite of true Dylan fans around the world.

Oh, and another reason we have been so scarce is that we are hard at work on our novel, Egypt Cemetery, which will be  released by Beatdom Books in Spring, so please keep your eyes open for that, too! Once that is done, we will show some excerpts and get back to more regular blogging…we have just had SO much work to do that we are happy to have busy hands but we can only write so much and the blog takes a lot of energy, since it is so damned good!

Gentle Readers,

We have been busy and posting on the Beatdom site. We thought we should share this!

Posted by michaelhendrick in Beat News on December 8, 2011 4:10 pm / no comments

In November, Kitty Bruce, daughter and only survivor of comedy icon/legend Lenny Bruce, was gracious enough to talk to Beatdom about her father’s distain for organized religion, as evidenced in a number of his comedy routines, life at home and Lenny’s House, the twelve step rehab for women in NorthEast Pennsylvania which she started in memory of her father. Kitty tells us about her father’s, and her own, childhood in the new Beatdom Issue 10, The Religion Issue, on sale soon.

Was Lenny a Beat?

He was called that by police and press. Allen Ginsberg organized the “Emergency Committee Against the Harrassment of Lenny Bruce” during the 1964 Cafe Au Go Go trial in New York City. Queried on the connection between Lenny and the Beats, Kitty said, ”I’m very familiar with Allen, I knew Allen…if the question is, did my father sit around coffee houses and snap his fingers?…probably…haha..”

Many reached out to help Lenny when the law was out to kill him (Vincent Cuccia, one of the New York D.A.’s who prosecuted Bruce’s last obscenity case, said, “We drove him into poverty and bankruptcy and then murdered him. We all knew what we were doing. We used the law to kill him.”) and Kitty reaches back out to help women by providing a safe, sober and nurturing environment , providing support, education and other tools necessary to stay clean and sober.

 You can honor the memory of Lenny Bruce by donating to The Lenny Bruce Memorial Foundation, PO Box 1089, Pittston, PA 18640. Many of Lenny’s prized possessions and memorabilia are up for sale, for those who would like to help Lenny’s House and also own a priceless item such as the typewriter Lenny used or his famously-photographed trenchcoat! Send inquiries to the address above.

Beatdom Issue 10, The Religion Issue, is coming your way in a few days. Read what Kitty Bruce has to say, along with many other fascinating writers and great work by our excellent artists!!!

Beatdom is available at http://www.beatdom.com and http://www.amazon.com and http://www.kindle.com and www.usedbeatshop.com

We appeal to you today, as the title of this blog vaguely infers. More truly, it is our darling, Ferd, who is appealing. He was asking us an incomprehensible question to which we had no ready answer. He was inquiring as to what makes a person’s eyes, dart back and forth in their skull, from side to side, at an estimated rate of 1000 times a minute.

Our first inclination was to see if a human can observe something 1000 times in a minutes without it being a blur, at all. He does not own a PC so we could not Google it. We certainly imagine that it must create a blur for the person in question, who’s eyes must keep them in a state of constant blur. We could not think of any facts to correlate with whether such a thing was even in the realm of being possible. It did strike us as rather funny, when he held up his two index fingers, parallel to each other and two inches apart as he moved them back and forth repeatedly and said, ‘They go just like this!’..and made a machanical noise, “ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch”. We did not ask if the eyeballs make the noise, too,  but it added to the amusement so we accepted it.

 The eyes in question are attached to a young woman whom Ferd believes has an interested in him. She stares straight into his pupils when here eyes vibrate or bounce or whatever you call such ocular activity. For this reason, he really wants to know what is with the eyeballs. They smoke a lot of cigarettes together, romantically hanging around the dumpster in back of the supermarket where they both work. We told him that You, Our Dear Readers, may have an explanation for such a strange quirk of the body and if no answer was forthcoming that you would nonetheless find it of great amusement. Knowing his every odd habit is being reported on here anyway, he implored, “Ask them!!!!”, and so, Dear and Kind Readers, should you be familiar with this anomaly of optical physiognomy, kindly tell us why eyes, not just pupils, but the whole orbs of both eyes would look like they should register on the Richter Scale. If you know the cause of this, kindlt contact us here in the ‘Comments’ section.

 Her eyes are hazel by colour, by the way, and she is also his supervisor, besides being a smoking buddy. The intensity with which she stares straight into his eyes while vibrating has led him to the conclusion that, since she is in management, she may be scanning him like a bar code. We would love to see the lines in that bar code. “I think she is scanning me!,” he uttered in paranoid frustration.

 Ferd did show a little class, this time around, and as the trippiness wore off, he broke out a jar of cheap caviar and a box of Wellington Water Crackers, “the gold standard,” as it says on the box. Liking something salty to help develop a thrist for the Corona Lite, we were duly impressed, as was his black cat, Spooky, who smelled it right away and hopped onto a chair at the table, where we ladled out a spoonful of the black fish eggs for him to devour. As Ferd said his standard line about caviar, one we have heard no less than a dozen times since he bought the jar for our birthday, “Ma Kettle says they are like buckshot on toast!”, Wilhelmina, his other kittie, took a sniff of the caviar and left it for Spooky.

 So as we talked about life and love and 1000-moves-a-minute-eyeballs, Ferd dumped out his feelings for the young woman, some twenty years his junior. The attraction is basically that she talks to him and stares in his eyes kinescopically. It could be love. This aspect scares him. See, he has a problem with relationships, as he brought up the subject.

 ”I wear my heart on my sleeve,” he said, looking around for the missing Bic lighter we always pocket while visiting, “Everytime I have sex with a woman, I end up falling in love with her!”

 ”Well, Ferd,” we replied, trying not to laugh too hard, “you are supposed to do it the other way around.”

 Puzzled silence as he picked in his ear.

 ”I mean you are supposed to love somebody before you have the sex,” we explained.

 ”Really?” he sounded puzzled, “Maybe that’s my problem!”

 ”Perhaps it is, Ferd,” we offered while sniffling back another laugh, “perhaps it is…”

Daily, if we drive an automobile, we are forced to deal with all sorts of things on the newly Obamasized highways and roads of our nation. Many of  them can and will annoy us, while others drive us, literally, to distraction.  Manners are in short supply but nowhere is the supply shorter than on our roads.

People do not care about the other driver anymore. It is like a battlefield out there some days. In the film, It’s A Gift, starring W C Fields, we see roadhogs get their due when our tipsy hero buys a whole fleet of cars to follow him around and purposely crash into roadhogs.

Roadhogs are one of the worst problems. They cause a lot of the rage. Roadhogs come in all shapes and sizes, like the Harley-Davidson rider who feels he belongs in the passing lane while going 40 miles an hour, because he is a ‘biker’. No wonder we hate bikers so much. It brings back the Carlin line about how people used to ride bikes to piss off the squares and now it is the squares who ride the bikes.

When not slowing traffic down, they often feel the should ride on the center of the double-yellow lines, to show their ownership of the road, which they bought with the title to the cycle…probably because they could not afford a decent car. If you see one on the double-yellow, swerve towards them. You are really doing them a favor, since the increase in heart-rate and blood flow will keep them more alert and less prone to injury. Plus, the look of terror on their faces is always a gas, too. Bicycles are the same way. They really do need to make separate paths for bicycles, as these idiots in the shiny pants (which leads one to question their sensibility to ride a skateboard, much less a bicycle) are some of the rudest variety of roadhog…the self-righteous alternative transportation roadhog. A blare of the horn as you edge up behind them always gets a little jump out of them, if you do not have a squirtgun full of warm milk handy.

Tailgaters are maybe the worst of all, next to the cellphoners. Tailgaters show some of the more developed asshole tendencies. Often they will drive 45 mph in a 55 mph zone, and to be sure they slow down everybody else, they do this in the passing lane. Remember the passing lane? It used to be for passing. If you pass a tailgater on the inside lane and then shift over to the fast lane because you are in passing mode, they will often speed up just to tailgate you for passing them. They were in no hurry before you passed them but they took the move as a personal affront and feel like they must tailgate your car so you know they can go fast, too. Of course, we know the most common way to deal with this is to ‘brake check’ them, that is to hit your brakes hard so they almost hit the back of your car. Keep in mind that if they hit you from behind, it is always their fault, by law.

Sometimes such an action will rile up the offending party and they will continue the dangerous habit of riding your bumper.  If you have a car (which is really the only thing to drive if you do not haul heavy junk and are environmentally responsible), you may have windshield wipers that spray washer fluid over the roof of your car and onto the windshield of the car behind you. If so, a good thing to do is to lay on the sprayer a few times until you see the car behind you put on the windshield wipers. When they are distracted by that and cannot see clearly due to the wipers, hit your brakes then! It usually scares all hell out of them. Again, it may only rile them up, so we suggest keeping a few rolls of pennies or a cup of old rusty nuts and bolts in the console of your vehicle. These metal objects, when flipped over the top off your car, will bounce off the highway and, depending on what speed you are traveling, bounce up into the  grill of the car behind you or, if you are lucky, the windshield. Old golf balls from the shag bag are good for this, as well, as the large white orb has a scarier effect when flying toward you. The good thing about using pennies is that they are barely visible, should an officer look for evidence of projectile-influenced rage.

Sunday drivers have been an annoyance for nearly a century now. They are usually old and have no idea what is going on. If you rage at them, it does no good. They have to turn up the hearing aid just to hear you honk at them and that action alone slows them down by another 10 mph. If you have to drive on a Sunday, take valium.

Most offensive these days is the cellphone user. Most roadhogs and tailgaters are cross-addicted to the cell. This works in your favour because they are distracted. To them a brake check is especially terrifying. They really ought not to be on the phone and most states have laws against it. As much as we at CFYSA hate the law, we try to help the enforcers of the laws when it comes to these selfish, talkative bastards who think they are so important that if they do not phone to say where they are at the moment, the world will stop.

 If you see someone on a cell, lay on your horn. The person on the other end of the line will get an earful, as well. Better yet, here is a trick we learned by mistake a few weeks ago. Sitting at a red traffic light, we looked over and saw a driver yapping inanely on the cell, waiting for the light to change. We were not even with this car but our hood was about even with the driver’s window, perfect for a blare of the horn. We were in a two lane left turn exit from a shopping plaza that dumped onto a well-trafficked road. Reckoning to give the driver/cell-user a little blast of sound, we hit the horn. When we honked, the car abruptly pulled out, through the red light, into traffic.  Apparently, they were used to being honked at for sitting through green lights while yapping and thought they had done it again. Luckily, they did not get hit by another car but it certainly opened a whole new avenue of fun to us. Try it sometime and see for yourself! We encourage you!

There are many other ways to deal with the rogues of the road but we just wanted to throw out a few helphul hints for the novice ragers in the ethernet. Happy motoring!!!

Still, again, we find ourselves apologizing for our absence. Since we last wrote, we had a strange interlude with Ferd, which we did manage to get on a cassette tape and will to you shortly.

More exciting, upon celebrating the anniversary of the birth of our hero, the great Lenny Bruce, we discovered that a friend of ours is a mutual friend of Lenny’s only child, daughter Kitty Bruce. We were offered an introduction and Kitty is granting us an interview which will appear in the tenth issue of Beatdom, the religion issue. Lenny took a lot of swipes at religion and we are very fortunate that Kitty is so gracious to share her time with Beatdom. She will be in good company, of course.

Also, in Beatdom news, we made contact with Richie Ramone, fastest of the three Ramones drummers and writer of several Ramones hits, including Somebody Put Something In My Drink, a set standard at any later Ramones show. He has also agreed to talk with Beatdom about the Beat aspects of life on the road with the Ramones, among other things. It is interesting to note that the Ramones were the fastest-playing group in the original first wave of Punk. That makes Richie the fastest of the fast, and you can read him tell about it in Beatdom issue eleven.

So, it goes without saying that we have been busy (even though we just said it) and part of the bustle had to do with the release of the third book from the publishing house of the modern Beat, Beatdom Books.  Our third release is the ‘hot off the presses’ yet long-awaited tale of  a modern Beat suffering through an ‘on the road’ adventure, as given to us by Beatdom’s Fearless Leader and Editor-In-Chief, our partner, Mr. David S. Wills.

We are seeing more and more about Korea in the news these days, so as world-citizens, we offer this review of Mr. Wills’ tome:

 We see here a photo of Allen Ginsberg, taken by Jerry Aronson, maker of The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, which is reviewed (with four more exclusive photos) in Beatdom Issue 9. It was taken at Grant Park, Chicago, in 1968 during the infamous riots at the Democratic National Convention.

 Ginsberg chanted to distract the protestors from marching because he did not want them becoming active due to his presence and ending up with their blood on his hands because he incited them to challenge armed police.

 Allen Ginsberg is universally-known as a good and kind man. In Aronson’s film, a comment is made by counterculture icon Ed Sanders about how to decide if a course of action is right or wrong. He offers that the best choice is to ask ourselves, ‘What would Allen do?’

Today, someone took umbrage to the fact that we stated that the list of ‘demands’ offered by the protestors have nothing to do with day to day trading activity on Wall Street. The demands, if anything, would benefit Wall Street. Take the end of the war on drugs, for instance. If that were to happen and sweet marijuana were made legal, it would open up a whole new industrial segment and provide jobs for millions and bring billions into the economy yearly. Companies would be formed, like the already existing Medical Marijuana, Inc, (MJNA.PK), which would put a whole new breath of air into the sagging sails of the US economy.

The protestors want student loan forgiveness. If student loans were forgiven, people would have more money to spend on other things. This would lead to an increase of profits by many industry segments, including food, clothing and consumer discretional spending, to name just a few. The increased profits would lead to stronger balance sheets and the value of the stocks of these companies would rise with the tide. How is this an anti-Wall Sreet agenda?

How about ‘free education kindergarten through college’?  That one seems to undermine the whole financial system, alright, as who is going to pay and since we have never had any children we certainly hope these protestors have pockets that are deep enough to pay our share. Again, though…what does this have to do with Wall Street…not one bleeding thing!

Oh, and let us remind you all that these are ‘Official’ demands. Who is the official? Did the protestors elect another Obama-like figure who is the Official and presides over them? Speaking of His Nibs, the Prez, most of these protestors look like the same foolish bastards that were campaigning for Obama in the first place and if it were not for the pissing contest between Obama and the GOP in Congress, we would not be in the bad economic shape we are in.

The problem lies in Washington, not on Wall Street. Regulatory statutes are not voted on by the men and women who broker trades on Wall Sreeet. They are voted on by the elected official picked by the american voters. Put the blame in the right place if you expect any real action. This is the real world. School is out for ever, as Alice Cooper said.

Then we have the repeal of capital punishment…another hot topic on Wall Street. We guess what happens is that when somebody is meant to be executed, they are transported to New York City, where a bunch of stock brokers have a secret back room where they hang, dismember, gas, stab, shoot and stone the poor people who do not have jobs because Obama does not agree with Congress…does this make sense to you? Odd, it makes no sense to us but this is what people are getting their heads busted over.

Who is the great mind who thought of having all the kids go out and get gassed and clubbed by the garda? Who put the lives and safety of all those people behind their own twisted ideology and is responsible for the violence that the protestors wear like the red badge of courage? Who is the face behind this? That is your criminal. There is the evil force du jour.

Equal Rights for women…gee, we have seen many successful women on Wall Street. As long as they can hustle the equities, they are equal. As long as they make money for their company, they are equal. In the minds of the protestors, however, Wall Street is a place in New York City, once the most progressive city in the world until LA got the jump with medical marijuana, where woman are held in dungeons and treated like serfs. This is all getting a bit silly but we reckon you get the idea.

Why Wall Street? It does not make the laws. Wall Street is their saviour, if these moron would open their eyes. If they had jobs, they would not be in the park. If they were looking for a job, they would not be in the park. If they had not voted for Obama, they would not be in the park. Why not Washington? Why not in front of the White House?

These kids are amateurs, for one thing. They have no grasp of how society works, if they are in NYC and the problem is in DC.

They will affect no real change, except for the change in a few profiles when the billyclubs break their noses and open their foreheads. It is more likely that some old guy, some old WWII veteran, who’s wife died because she could not get the proper medical attention or because they could not afford medicine due to the tactics of our elected officials – the ones who are paid to represent our voices and then take money from lobbyists to stick up our collective ass. One of these old guys is going to take his hunting rifle down off the wall, where it has been collecting dust for 20 years and go to DC and plug himself a few pols. As he is led away in cuffs, some of his buddies from the VFW will see him on TV, while drinking at the bar, and feel the ‘band of brothers’ emotion that got them through that great war and take to DC with their own guns. They will not care about mace because they will just shoot. They are not far from dead and what they had is being taken away bit by bit, so what do they have to lose? Not a damned thing. The old guys are our hope for change, not these young wankers who think it is time for a party and may as well get their childhood agressions beat out of them by a uniformed cop.

Occupy Wall Street? Why not occupy Disneyworld?  That would hurt a lot more people. It would dent the tourism, airline, automobile rental, hotel and restaurant businesses from Florida to all ends of the USA because people would not be buying gas or taking planes or stopping to eat or staying at a hotel on their way to the wonderland of american moronism. This would really hurt Wall Street.

With the elections coming up, all this protesting does is to keep focus off the real issues and agendas facing the american people…like voting for somebody with a brain who can get us out of this mess.  This is the sort of thing the FBI of CIA could arrange to keep the country is a state of upheaval so the light is not shone of the FEMA camps they set up in Denver, CO, this weekend. Did you hear about that? – or was there not enough space for the news on both so you hear about the protestors, instead? These kids in the parks deserve what they get. Anybody who is dumb enough to challenge a policeman, whether you are on the right side or the wrong side of moral boundary, is gonna get one up against the side of the head. That is how it works. It has always been that way and if you do not get it, you are a right imbecile!

These people act surprised that the police are hurting them…what the fuck? The city is broke enough and can’t feed kids in school and has other programs where funds have been cut and now they have to pick up the tab for all the overtime the police are working to contain this foolish fracas.

We hope that every cop who gets paid overtime for working the Wall Street Occupation, cashes his check and takes that money right to Wall Street and purchases some stock in American companies. Then, the ‘occupation’ would actually help the economy. We wonder how many displaced pretzel and falafel vendors have gone out of business because they could not find space to park their food carts. This occupation is for idiots but we are a nation of idiots so it will probably drag on for a while…but on the bright side, at least they are not teabaggers.

 While not every poem we write is a great one, sometimes we write them anyway. We realize it is time for a blog and Ferd hasn’t done anything noteworthy to report on today, so why not just take the time and take this rhyme and maybe enjoy it and maybe not.

 It was on a piece of paper next to the laptop when we woke up, so we may as well share it here and then we do not have to stick it in a drawer with all the other poems on loose leafs.

 Our eventual friend, Mr Happy Death, awaits us all, so we may as well give the devil his due and what better way than with some good, old-fashioned poetry?

We have been tied up in many projects of late and the Fall peformance by the Lit Undressed group of Omaha, NE, looms large in our headlights. The Omaha Lit Fest, a wonderful event and one of the many cultural offerings to be found in the ‘NoDo’ (Northern Downtown) area of Omaha, is partly funded by the Nebraska Council for the Arts, as well as many other community-minded organizations. Omaha seems like a great place to live. The more we hear about it, the more we find to like.

The event takes place October 13-15 and rehearsals started this week. Here is a brief summary of the event, this go-round:

The focus of this year’s (downtown) Omaha lit fest is Silk & Sawdust, the heart and mechanics and literature. Authors will participate in panels, readings and discussions to lift the corner of the curtain on their methods and processes, and look at the literal tools of production—including book-making and design, and our curious nostalgia for the typewriter.

Included in this theme are fashions of famous literary characters—from the Tin Woodman’s heart of silk and sawdust in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, to Jay Gatsby’s pink rag of a suit in The Great Gatsby, to Jane Eyre’s grey and black gowns and Virginia Woolf’s explanation of fashion in Orlando, fashion plays a major role in many characters’ roles and sometimes the storyline.

When presented with ‘fashion’ as a subject, we immediately blogged about old shoes…a more recent blog which can be found by searching on this page. This time, we decided to write about…well, you can read the title….

My Favorite Bellbottoms