XFactor

Have you heard Carly Rose yet? You will. If you don't you ain't got ears.

If we are the end, then the machines, so beautiful more beautiful than us - what of them?

An old man beaten who fought for freedom, this is unbelievable unconditionally unforgivable! Let's trump hope with grit. Men who speak well can't govern. Elections are a sham. I'd rather have us pick them like Celebrity Apprentice. Judge who is worthy, America, as if you have a choice. Too many handlers between the people and the man.

Unfinished thoughts are welcome; you can finish them how you like. We don't need another writer, flaming out futilility. I as an outsider have the ability to think. Stuck here in the clink. Driven to drink. Too drunk to drive. Too alive to survive. Too true to open mouth. Too blue to let it out. True blue, you are the glue. What is why? Where is the how? When will be Forever.

Ludicrous Canadiana Interpretation of Now For Plan A by The Tragically Hip

[Go buy it now!]

My song by song analysis shows some overlooked connections between the meaning of the Tragically Hip's latest album, Now For Plan A, and this great land we call North of America.

1. At Transformation: This is a rock-hard stage-melter that will put clicks on iPhones, but undulating deeper this an opaque stab at the Western Canadian shale gas fracking industry, which transforms water into money via bad-smelling gas by-products.
2. Man Machine Poem: How did Margaret Atwood's long-distance book-signing quill change literature and the Internet as we know it? Listen to this multi-vocalic screamer and absorb.
3. Lookahead: The fact Sarah Harmer sings on this one means it's about the Niagara Escarpment, a large landmass one can't easily look-ahead of, lest it escarp' your eyes out!
4. We Want to Be It: The Hip have won many Juno awards, yet have never hosted the Junos. A blood-hearted romp that teases political scion Ben Mulroney about his amazing hair, as Ben 'dripped' with promise but never achieve gubernatorial transcendence.
5. Streets Ahead: A song about love, not between a man and a woman, but a man and his dogsled team. The dog team - can he keep it together? Iditarod-know that!
6. Now for Plan A: Since the Avro Arrow was scrapped, there have been many plans, including the current F-35 debacle, to harness the future of our skies via superior aerial war machines. Sarah Harmer returns us to our pre-Diefenbaker roots with an ode to the Arrow. Nothing short of everything will be enough to revive this long-dead Icon of aerospace. If this song were McDonald's it wouldn't be an 'all beef patty', it would be an 'All-Dief Plan A'
7. Modern Spirit: A sinuous ear-trip along Halifax's Blowers Street, this song reminds us that the full-bodied nourishment of the stately Donair sandwich can only be appreciated with more 'modern' condiments, including the 'spirits' or harsh liqueurs once imported by the 1700s' rum trade into Dartmouth harbour. An apoplectic tromp l'oreille.
8. About The Map: As the eruption of Nunavut's existence redrew the Canadian mapscape, a cartographer reminds his curious child about what lies 'beyond the maps' of the frozen north: a lush canticle that gets to the truth about pemmican, Northern values, and the pernicious igloo stereotypes that retard progress among our north folk.
9. Take Forever: As singer Gord Downie flies among the skies to tour the West, he has a nervous breakdown and realizes that only Calgary's mayor, Naheed Nenshi, will grant him clearance to land. A song about a province turned away from its 'forever' values of Ralph Klein-conservatism to a swaggering stage-strut driven by good loud music that only Eastern boys like the Hip can hustle up. 'Take' that to your Stampede and lasso it.
10. Done and Done: Inspired by the Vancouver Stanley Cup riots, this is also a song about the Hip's quest to secure better digital copyright laws for us all, as well as a stab in the face of Tony Clement's gazebo-building megalomania masked in the soft strains of a 50-year-old Bill Derlago fan's plea to finally get his way on the hockey rink.
11. Goodnight Attawapiskat: The Hip go to Northern Ontario and build a canoe out of birch, just as Tom Thomson did. What erupted was an amazing outdoor all-night BBQ perfectly described in this emotive palette-cleanser.

Esoteric Insults Revisited

You masticating Marmaduke, fraught with impotent friction-making malarkey, all sparks and spithammers, lacking any lust for levity! You drink the pigeon's gall and call it a tasty grilled-cheese sandwich. Lend me a time machine so I can smite your ancestors; meanwhile I'll blacken your every nanonotion across the wide Web's comment boards. O crabcake-eating micelicker, lighten your dungarees from their present shade of brown, O bepampered poopulouse! Scram from my boardwalk, you lurching orangutan, lest I unleash a quiver of quartz-quilled moronocide to shatter every non-sense in your ululating husk. O big flamboyant monk in a monastery of Melvins, I shudder at your puissant horsebuggery and general lack of concern for what even a dying vulture has the basic sense to blush at. I could calculate the sum total of your ignorance but my abacus is spent for zeros, you null-set and non-existent irrational number! Leave this wasted realm and surrender your sideways scupperheadedness!

(See original Highfalootin' Insults)

A neat little almost sentence

Ever dwelled, we wooden walkers, we warm bell men, we loud tent men, we proud pigpen ten, then sent to Sendlak with no sendbacks, mac truck and bent backs, lent to scrap, sold as a mat in a maze with a rat in a cage buying all the bars back. 

Better alive!

Oh my grandma said something strange to me a in dream. She said, 'Do not knot the donut hole.' Which thing, a string cannot make, what is round and baked. Ever we sit and stare and wonder why those sitting and staring do not care. Where is the first man to crack? He is there sitting quietly at the back. Have some sympathy for the soldiers in Syria. Firing rounds into the sky out of spite, proving all the great thing about a society run by men, for the sanctity of the state, a conspiracy across international lines, you know one country won't mess with another's mojo rising. Right and wrong has ceded to power and vacuum -- which I guess becomes the more urgent paradigm faced with your own annihilation and the disappearance of your birthright which used to be the afterlife? 

Second Floor Ryerson Library

Potent pizza is a perfect pestilence possibility. I was screwing a large caboose into an onion bun and it occurred to me, shall I shallot a scarecrow? Shall I shimmy with slimy murk into a bodum of unfair frothery? Things are piglet-worthy and mucusmaking. 

If ever a cylindrical cullulent pigeon did unman a masked mysterioso then surely sixteen succubi could collect an unemployment cheque from a red-faced postman. If a college degree meant anarchy then the streets of Quebec would be swept with sweaty pit stains and colander-cudgelling jesuvants. If a jesuit, I mean, did quaggle and fleck then surely his hysteria about the biscuit was just another knottleneck? Poor pissed pachyderms, prancing without the ability to jump, large elephantine fairy queens dusting rhythm guitars like so many Ron Wood replacements uttering magic passwords in the basement of the Rivoli, lacking hot heat, lacking fresh feet, drying wet wit with looks of loathing and curled lips, eating too many tofu tacos in an underwear commercial's catering van restroom.

Can I quell a Cosbyfest? Could Theo ever drive a bus? We waste what we waver, we waive all rights to disenslavement that is emancipation if we neglect the ballot box out of jade frustration. I was warm to the world but cooked like a log, blackened charcoal in my nether zones and soggy from the bog. If a klepto took my tethering hooks--how will I climb a mountain? I shake like Evgeni Malkin, he of fame, of mispronounceable name. Twagger your digits like a disapproving simpleton sloshing about in tens and twenties from hours vending Bingo cards at the bingo place on St. Clair, where chain smokers don't care and lives wind down like the west wind, and a win is a win and a loss means it's time for a smokebreak.

Have a cup of ice-cold gelato. It's after 1pm; I'm drowning on my tip toes in Arizona heat, killing strangers with stares and oozing blackheads from my feet. We ooze proud, we yodel ever loud, we will publish or perish or perhaps both at once, going on vacation for 72 months. Can I call you in the morrow? I need a ride to the Scarborough Zoo, my driver has the flu. He was not reliable like you.

Hamish Macbain trolled for hours in the wild, eating dried skins from the tree whose name no one has written, taken tidbits of misfits and missed facts and complaints and loaded them all onto a server in a closet in a hallway of an office in the suburbs of the capital city of a minor province in a confederacy of future lands locked down under empire struggling for solvency due to solar flares interfering with economic growth models fashioned by 19th century professors amid the dust of a chalkboard.

On Twitter

Can we cross media? An experiment: www.twitter.com/cupcakemanto

Palm Beach Calisthenics

1. Why not smucker your pucks and drop your digits? It's a little after ten and I'm slewshing anew. Big Bill Boggins bought a racecar. Left out to throw out music from the ashtray, slapped on plastic and masked Michaelmas mournings. Ovid drew a nice noose from a sluice caboose, yelling half an hour an hour near the suburbs of Toulouse, "Crack my gills, smack windowsills - I'm yellow and fed on fear, I've eleven of your twelve-year-olds, they're German and they're kind." I don't swear like I used to but otherwise I'm fine. 
2. Gob left the Earth and tried to jump, I never knew he didn't have an elephant and I was killing peanuts to the potions to the best of the rest, the leftout cassocks, the rousted mass monks, the fifty-four five-fruit trays filled with kiwis, the wired rests the diacritical extrapolations and the Federation of the Jest. 
3. Oh Meg, you could drum! So easy to hum. I don't know what love is. In Piazza Grande lies the bum. 
4. We worked too hard. We were tired. I lived too long, didn't leave myself to future generations, I consumed all I had, I was afraid of leaving, stretched out the living, didn't invest in centuries of infrastructure, took civilization-building as someone else's problem, couldn't make the connection between watching reality tv and ignoring reality.
5. Left to devices, the bridge ices, smoker vices, rice dries, pies fly, sighs cry, eyes die.
6. Clogged to the cuffs, I considered all the stuff I had. I let out the hallway. Filled with dust. I must mop, I can't stop. Sheer smiles are worth the admission, left out on sidewalk with a hat and poor nutrition. Contrite and bleeding, walking up and around all about with yellow, moments of mild meanness mixed with patience, stayed up all night working on your science project, the baking soda volcano, year of the ash, Anno domino, pompeii exploded in seventy-nine, trapped in time 20000 loose living Romans coughing on their rapidly crashing property values, priceless tourism snapshots to be vandalized and voyeured like Snooki's blog. 

What we've been doing

Remember when words mattered, image matter of factly worldwide, mouths open wide at a picture, yesterday's news could get ditched and forgotten, and feelings and fantasies weren't verboten. Mugged as I was, drawn to black arts, loaded onto slaveships, that cruel heart of dartboards, overboard with big lungs so your brain survive 4 minutes without air, the longer I live without you, the more I guess I care. Silence is an investment, see? 75 days with no coronary artery. No, it's serious, business school, not a party.

We get what's given in - that's 1-to-1, win-win, just timelines, giggling frauleins, make sure you make mine, bring a tray of cherry pie; if my boss thanked me with a two-person screening of Casablanca I guess I'd also cry. There's no point of view, just a field of vision, and in the ocean, there's you. She waved her wand, outpoured a tall blonde, short roast, if you smile they sit and empty wallets: it happens on both coasts. Sit for a day, measure magic - it's tough to sell tickets; vinegar, whine, so tragic.

Melt goals, make a saint. Wash facepaint, lead as marshmallow man, nice guy, big fan. 'Thanks for being you' said he on his stool - give so much, tough to love that much - the whole school he built from scratch and such. And we wait, procrastinate. We bronze our heroes far too late. But sorry, gotta run, got a mani-pedi-facial date.

Load up on likes! I got an app that let's me bike in my pyjamas; I can play a game where I samurai bananas, that's why I'm under the stairs - hide me from the red bandanas. We're releasing 4 new genders next month, no wonder we get a trillion dollar valuation, all that love from the S&P, we're the most heavily weighted factor in the ethersphere, all it took was a flat screen separating us, connecting us, proving there's a market niche out there for the unedited burps of sub-humanoid xx312322-ab-489-cupafree.