WAKE UP HAMISH

[Jack Hinks]

With all due respect, I continue to defend Mike from those who say he's out of (or over the) line.

He's not ranting. He's attempting to make a clear and public statement -- after, apparently, a number of unanswered private statements -- in the interest of protecting his work. In our litigious society this is necessary, not frivolous and certainly not mean-spirited. Give the poor guy a break.

-- JH

[Lindi]

I understand why Mike is upset. Someone quoted his material without his consent. He should take this to WN off the main forum. WE can't delete anything. Maybe it's for public record. Will this go to court? "His job was to maintain the massive sausage making equipment." Will this end up facing a judge to determine damages? What exactly are we on Writing Craft supposed to do? If I walked into a restaurant and ordered the people at the next table to bring me a steak, they'd look at me like I was nuts. It's not their job.

[Chris Graham]

I think Australia is about 12 to 13 hours ahead of the US, so it's almost impossible for Hamish to be timely in responding to most of the posts on WN.

Mike: The fact that your post brings up what may be considered legal issues, could mean that Hamish is forced to now investigate said issues before responding in any way. It's a shame (and not your fault) but I'm sure he just doesn't have that much time to devote to a message board that creates absolutely NO revenue for WN. Hamish will do the right thing, he always does, but you have to be patient.

Granny: Once again, you are the source of both wisdom and knowledge. Thanks for your response to my rant a few days back regarding Gerund Clauses. I was being an A$$ anyway, but I used a real-life example that I was struggling to understand and definitely benefitted from your explanation. Thank you.

-Chris

[Elizabeth]

She's doing well for a lady of ninety and showing herself to be the voice of reason on this forum (not for the first time).

You know, last week we were a little worried about her: getting forgetful, not knowing where her false teeth were, tripping over her zimmer-frame, dropping her thesaurs all the time. But give her a good crisis (or a gerund mis-identification) and the old grey cells zap back into activity. Last time we saw her this aerated it was Watergate (or was it the Munich crisis?).

Now, Gran: take yourself off to bed for a little shut-eye. You've done well, keeping the youngsters in check but you need to harness your energy. I'll pull your knitting out for you and find you that recording of Richard Burton reading Under Milk Wood and you can have a nice quiet morning while the young 'uns calm down. We'll give you a call if anyone's got any passive voice problems.

[stan grondas]

Dear Mike

You mean your stuff is out there in cyberspace for just anybody to read? Isn't that the point?

Confused.

[stan grondas]

Now wait a minute Mister Grondas. It's all very well you telling somebody else that it's cool to have his writing being used willy nilly by every tom dick and harry (no women?) but why don't you show us yours and let's spread that all over the world and see how you feel?

[stan grondas]

O.K. you asked for it. You think you can out dare me? You got another thing coming. And here it is. AND please tell the whole world to do what they want with it. There's plenty more where this comes from.

Cape Town --- July 2003.


Dearest Benni

You’ve heard about the hamburger that’s pure beef. It's also pure baloney. Apparently it's easier to score uncut coke than it is to find uncut hamburger. I just heard on the radio that the beefiest patty on the market is only eighty-five percent red meat. And the rest? A binding agent.

So why am I telling you this? I've been locked up in this room the past fifty-two hours and I am hoping if not to kill time then at least to slap it around a bit. And the gastronomy? It's been nil-per-mouth the past two days so the radio hamburger (source Codex or something) drew my attention. As I was sitting here giving the truth content of my story-to-be-to-you some pre-prod. Life is a hamburger then. You see how these things come up?

So what do you say if I ask - what if the hamburger rules apply to story telling? I mean what if bull**** equals binding? Then no matter how many nons behind fiction the most factual human interest story I have ever heard (or told) was held together with a some or other percentage of …. bull****? Sounds about right but it shouldn't be like that - should it? It's not about if then - it's about how much? But as the green-tinged Serb at the bottle store doesn't tire of telling me - It take only one small spoon of @!#$ to spoil a whole bucket of ice-cream my
friend. -

His my friend is unisex. The old fashioned one-size-fits-all Soviet egalitarian overall which is how he dresses too. Now there's a connection …… I digress.

So! Is this universal? Is there a little bit of @!#$ in everything? This thought is fresh. I don't know. What about the bible? That has to be one hundred percent binding-free. So is that why some of the stories in it fall apart? Everybody has their favourite one - the one you can't possibly swallow. Digest as the Greeks call it. So you want to know mine? I digress again but just this once.

The Immaculate Conception. First time I heard that one I was a little kid so I thought cool. Did they say cool in the olden days? I said cool -what's the big deal? The arum **** made her pregnant. Later I mixed it up with the Greek swan that gives one of the Olympian girls what for. It would be years before I knew how the whole conception deal goes down anyway. And by the time I found out I was right in the middle of my Pubescent Catholic Passion Period so the lilly was replaced by the Holy Spirit and off we went. Which means I didn't give Immaculate a thought when I came back from my little apostolic diversion so I was now in my early thirties when the Virgin Mary came back into my life as they say. I was in a bar (of course) in one of those M.O.T.H bunker type bars in the Rhodesian bush during the war. (around Umtali) There were some old guys fondly reminiscing about WWII so it was Egypt - R and R in Cairo - El Alamein - the Desert Fox - the Desert Rats - all that good stuff - when one of the old guys - in a distracted little aside - remembers that while doing a bit of amateur proselytising he happened to tell an Arab the story of the Immaculate Conception. The bugger - he said - laughed his head off. The Arab apparently broke the story down to Mary coming home pregnant. Then telling the husband she was a still a virgin. If the Arab laughed at that - imagine how he must have howled when the Englishman told him that the husband actually believed her. Well I had believed her too. So suddenly I was standing in this ****ty bar - warm beer in hand feeling like the biggest bloody idiot between heaven and earth. The last to know. It broke the seal on my bucket so I believe it's possible there is some crap in there - even if it's only just a DNA trace. So. So much for the truth-and-nothing-but-manual.

Then here's a great opportunity. I am thinking. Right now. Why not shoot for zero binding? In - How I Got To Number One On South Africa's Most Wanted List? What have I got to lose? Popularity? Of course a tale or two might break up what with no binding but it would be small price to pay for a story with zero bull****! Just think of it Benni Bumjewel. While I think of fried onions and a crispy prego roll and those flat chips dusted with chilly powder and All Gold Tomato Sauce to dip into.

Benni if you are anywhere as ready to read as I am to eat - prepare yourself for a double shakespeare and I'll start with the phone call from my cousin Kosta (maternal) in Athens. Who asked if he could come to see me in
Jor-harness-boorg because he had a serious problem. Which understandably he did not wish to discuss over the phone. Of those two red flags which one do you think was waving around most energetically? It was understandably. In other words we were in it together before I could even ask what it was we were in.

I'm not saying I would have been relaxed if he hadn't used either one. I am The Greek Worrier. Do you ever ridicule your fears by playing the lyrics in your head? I played - just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not watching - but I couldn't shake the fact that the last thing I needed in my life right then was more heat. What do you understand from that? Since you can't answer then let me ask myself one. If I was so anti-heat why did I tell cuzzi to come on over? Answer: because my vanity overrides my good sense every time. So there I was driving to the airport in two cars to meet him with Gary Port and some of the lads (about eight of us in all) after days and nights of party! How many days and nights? For the history buffs who will be pouring over this material oner day - we started Saturday afternoon and it was now Tuesday night. And not being one to miss a chance to impress - Gary took the Porsche turbo and at the last minute decided to throw his M16 into the back seat.

Is that the mix that caused all the trouble? No. It's not what caused the trouble. No. The gun and the fast car played starring roles of course - but they didn't produce the show. But I ask myself now as I record these memories why the heck (don't say @!#$ in front of the kay-eye-dee-es) did I allow such a potentially lethal combination in the first place? Because the rifle is licensed and Gary is (or was) an extraordinary survivor. Anyway it probably wasn't as reckless as it sounds now. We had done the same thing many times before. At the apres-stag party Gary had emptied mags into country road signs with no comebacks. Could I have stopped him taking the rifle along that night if I had wanted to? Gary can be stuborn but if I had put a female premonition spin to my - I have a bad feeling about this Gary - he'd done enough of the white stuff to have caught a spook and left the gun behind.

Wait a minute. I actually encouraged him to bring the rifle along. Yes. Because I wanted to play some kind of practicle joke on Kosta around his perceptions of South African crime. Ronnie and I had done one with an Italian in the seventies which was the stuff of legend. Driving back in a pitch black night from Jan Smuts airport with this little skinny tailor from Calabria in the back of the car white-knuckling a hunting rifle. Taking no chances with the lions and the elephants that were lurking out there on the highway. Geddit?

Wait a minute. Is this another aside? Is that my binding? No. Because I told that story to Gary on the way to the airport and it obviously influenced events furether down the road. Do you buy that? Me neither. So if digression is binding. Then what we maybe need here is some of the real thing. What about the The Ten Commandments? You know -top drawer stuff. Those are dodgy too, right? Deffnitely not binding free. I mean where is - thou shall not kill time? -And why waste one on - thou shall have no other God but me ? - What is He? Insecure?

So bottom line - I was in control - which come to think of it was the problem. So what do I do - get somebody else to live my life for me? (now would be excellent timing)

About Gary being a survivor - get this. He had been running a tough business (Supertyres) and a frenzied social life for a couple of weeks - wait for it- on his hands and knees. Why? Because he had crushed both heels jumping from a great height wearing only cowboy boots.

Forget the only. That's binding. He had all his clothes on. So here's the young Kirk Douglas lookalike with long golden hair and the latest fashion gear crawling around on the floor ordering workers about and being charming to the girls. And acting as if being on all fours was the only way to get around in this world. Some low self-esteem types were probably envious and I'd love to say that I had seen some immitators. (wouldn't that be funny?) But the zero binding truth of it is that most people on first seeing him down there didn't know whether to laugh or put his name up for the cripple-of-the-year award. If you knew Gary - all this stuff meant that he was in no mood to be upstaged that night. Tuesday July 8 three and two thousand. That date mean anything to you?

Right. So we're at the airport and there's the usual shuffling in the ranks to make room for the new recruit otherwise everything is going smoothly. Not quite beef. On the surface things are going smoothly but underneath we got this growing feeling that The Rules are not being respected. Of course there was a whole lot of other stuff going on in and around the leisure-addled brains of our posse but omission can't count as binding because then it would take a herd of cows to make the size burger we'd need if I told you everything. (isn't that the definiton of a bore?)

Still if we had got into our cars and driven off right then ….. none of this would have happened? When last did you hear that one? So outside International Arrivals a traffic cop - a black guy - is writing out a parking ticket for Gary’s Porsche. We don't care about the money but we make a fuss so we can show off our cop handling skills. So true to form - Gary's more than mine - we make friends and even take pictures of the cops laughing and posing with arms around shoulders - a regular racial reconciliation fest with an overseas visitor thrown in to dilute any traces of past inequalities.

And we were leaving without further ado when Koos my mechanic - annoyed at our fraternizing - generated some friction that resulted in me slapping him. Voila! That was the spark that ignited the gunpowder that blew up the ammunition dump that cracked the dam that flooded the city that …. you get my drift…... that wiped out the world. My world. For a while. Or it could be permanent. The jury as they just said on the radio is still out on that one.

Now about this slap. As you might have guessed I am more a mouth followed by a scream followed by an even louder scream type. Although I had in fact slapped Koos once before and it hadn't even interrupted the flow of his drunken propositioning. But as it happened that night I knocked Koos off his feet. Technically that is. I mean he tripped over a trolley trying to avoid a second insult. Anyway this commotion created two sets of problems. One it drew more cops to the scene. And two I further aggravated the pecking disorder tension between Gary and myself - both highly predictable consequences under the circumstances.

So why did I do it? It was for a bunch of reasons but one of them had to have been the tiny lenght of yarn you pull to unravel the whole Clint Eastwood poncho so let's see if we can find it.

You want some more-er Dorra? Right here on the floor-er?

[stan grondas]

Dear Mister Grondas. I read as far as it took for me to realise that you have some axe to grind and it's not very savoury. It is clear you have lived around urban legends where levels of binding far exceed wildest expectations. Especially in bars where you seem to spend your life. But something smells here besides stale beer breath. Did I hear - Who Me? I am not fooled. Is anyone?

[stan grondas]

With all due respect to Mister Gorndas and there can't be much of that left. That was the best piece of writing I have ever read. Or had. Can we still be friends? I don't think so. Which is why I am never communicating this way again. Chalk it up. The first cyber suicide. For Rowland. Pop!

[Jack Hinks]

I get it.

Stan/RBSA/Rich is basically Hunter S. Thompson without the intellect.

Which is like Cheech & Chong without the jokes.

-- JH