Parts of Speech in Five Minutes!

You are free at last of those nasty grammarians. Adverbs, prepositional phrases, dangling participles, ye are cast aside!  I have for you a very simple introduction to English grammar that is all you will ever need.  You can master it five minutes.  Okay, six minutes, because there is one complication that was specifically introduced by medieval logicians to complicate our lives for all eternity.  That thorn in the side is the conjunctive 'and' together with the exclusive or inclusive 'or'.  Unfortunately, the 'or' is usually enunciated without specification as to whether it is inclusive, or, in the case of bad spellers, or bad spell checkers, if it is meant to row your boat.  And 'nor'?  I won't even go there.  Here is the only grammar lesson you will ever need.

The Parts of Speech:

Verbs:  words that make things go

            Example:  Get thee hence, Satan.

Nouns:  words that make things stay

            Example:  There is a house in New Orleans.

Pronouns:  Anonymous nouns

            Example:  We shall overcome.

Adverbs:  words that make verbs go faster

            Example:  Swim speedily across the creek before the alligators eat you!

Adjectives: words that make nouns more colorful

            Example:  Bang, Bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer came down upon his head!

Articles:  superfluous words that start sentences or separate verbs from adjectives or nouns

            Example:  If music be the food of life, play on.

Conjunctions:  words that tell you whether you must consider both, one or the other exclusively, or simply either one.  The most dangerous words in any language.

            Example:  If an object is observed to move, and it is determined that it shall or shall not move; then if it shall move, let it be; or if it shall not move, applieth thou horse glue; or if an object is observed not to move, and it is determined that it shall or shall not move, then if it shall move, applieth thou whale blubber; or if it shall not move, smite it thou with a wooden mallet.

Prepositions:  words that get you from here to there

            Example:  Bang, Bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer came down upon his head!

Interjection:  words that cover all things WTF

            Example:  WTF?!

Yanky Doodle

MIO Exclusive: Trump Says Reporter Could Have Been Wearing Suicide Tampon Bomb

My reporter on the ground in Wisconsin this week barely escaped bruises herself this week, brushing less than criminally past a Trump supporter with a pitch fork and a torch while the theme song from Peter and the Wolf blared from the loud speakers. She heard The Donald declaring OJ guilty as hell from the podium, and calling for death by beheading.

Trump also addressed the misdemeanor charges filed against his Campaign Manager, Corey Lewandowski, who was charged with battery against an ostensibly friendly Breitbart reporter.  "Corey, who is a GREAT GUY, was just protecting me," said Trump. "Who knows, she might have been wearing a suicide tampon bomb."

Unfortunately, my reporter didn't follow-up because she was distracted by the smell of free popcorn. However, before making her way over to the Circus Tent to stuff her face, she noted one last thing on her napkin: the Obama entourage had allegedly contracted a case of green diarrhea on their visit to Cuba. That's what the Castros have to offer, Trump said, is communism and green diarrhea. We're going to make America great again, declared The Donald, and that means brown diarrhea.

Yanky Doodle

White Privileged Lives Matter

It has been said the there is no Democratic or Republican way to collect the garbage. Balderdash! Not anymore! It turns out that there is a Republican way to collect the garbage. Namely, with an ass-wiping grin and a loathing for anybody who's not a white anglo victim of melanin.

It goes without saying that the garbage trucks should be fitted with 50-caliber machine gun mounts. For God's sake, do you know where they're going? Into neighborhoods with colored people that's where! Our sanitation engineers should be outfitted with camouflage too. I guess that means a background of broken windows and murals of Malcontent X.

And after all, what is garbage?  The latest from the Trump stump: Mexicans are garbage. Black people are garbage. Muslims are garbage. Everyone is garbage. Except 'us'.

Stand up for your privileges white people! Sure we dominate every board of directors, governorship, state legislature, pretty much every body of power in the land. Yet these coloreds want to worm their way in. A piece of the pie for Muslims? No way, no how! Bad enough that Mormons are in the game. And Mexicans! Give me a break! They can't even talk right!

Sure, it's really corporate greed and trends in globalization that are putting economic pressure on us. But isn't a simpler story to blame people who are even a shade off-white? Thankfully, we have Trump Power now! I move that we program our voting machines for "automatic" this fall; that is, automatic Trump, so we don't even have to bother to go to the polls. That way, Trump will win the minority vote hands down. As promised. See?

Yanky Doodle

PowerPoint Ranger

In case you’ve been living under a rock or camping under Spanish moss or living in a field of poppies (I like to give people options), Microsoft PowerPoint©™®^F*CKUGOOGLE is the world’s most popular slideshow presentation program. It is used by “engineers”, corporate robber barons, financial advisors (rich people who advise themselves, under the guise of advising you), “scientists,” and self-help experts. Since I belong to a profession whose name lives inside snigger quotes, I am of course a PowerPoint expert. We call ourselves PowerPoint Rangers.

Here is a whirlwind guide on how to put together a PowerPoint.  A PowerPoint slide consists of four parts: 

1.      A killer title;
2.      Photon torpedo bullets;
3.      Pretty pictures that exceed the thousand word limit;
4.      “Take-aways”, or “bumper stickers” that tell the reader what to think.

I will draw for you an example that everyone can relate to. Suppose Matthew had available to him the Holy PowerPoint when he wrote his Gospel of Jesus? Unlike Mark, who is a delicious read and makes Jesus exciting, Matthew is a horrible writer, and I would rather put an arrow in one ear and out the other than to have to read him again. Dull, dull, dull, except in his renderings of the sayings of Jesus, which he evidently copied from the elusive Q-source. But I digress.

It could all be different if Matthew had PowerPoint. I’ll show you. The following example is the first chapter of Matthew, in which our inept Gospel-ateer establishes that the prophecy of Isaiah has been fulfilled.

True, the Tree of Jesse did not exist in Matthew’s time, but surely he could have come up with some eye candy. You might also object that the graphic is unreadable. Inadmissible! The gist of it will come across to the audience in what we PowerPoint Rangers call “the audio.” The presenter will hit the highlights such as David and Abraham and Solomon and the patriarchy of the Second Temple and all that good stuff. No problemo.

Note how the title generates excitement and is positively titillating. The bullets are concise, hard-hitting, and cling to the major points. Matthew’s shtick is that Jesus should be accepted by the Jews as the messiah of prophecy, as all the requirements have been fulfilled, because, well, he says so.

Finally, the bumper sticker burns it in. Jesus was born to a virgin, he is the messiah, he is King of the Jews. Isn’t that better?

Of course, what counts are the sayings of Jesus. The Sermon on the Mount occupies Chapters 5 through 7. Let’s try our hand at Chapter 5.

The beguiling Jesus starts by seducing his audience with the sayings that later came to be known as the beatitudes, here neatly summarized in the language of PowerPoint. The rationale given by the Master, of course, goes in ‘the audio.’ Then “Matthew” (that is, we on his behalf) neatly summarizes the main points in power bullets. Matthew wouldn’t have had recourse to a Renaissance painting of the Sermon, but if we are the tiniest bit lucky, Matthew might have been a better sketch artist than he was a writer. Now, admittedly, a PowerPoint slide could never do justice to the lovely rhetoric of Jesus himself. The presentation could be accompanied by pamphlet handout capturing the full text of Jesus’s remarks. That would be a handier reference than a 1400 page Bible, which is almost as long as a Russian novel.

I will leave it to you to fill in the remaining 26 chapters and complete the literary salvation of Matthew.

Of course, we have adduced this New Testament exercise merely as an example of mastering PowerPoint. The lessons herein equally apply to convincing the Department of Defense to waste billions of dollars on an unfeasible weapon system; convincing the gullible to adopt a dietary fad that will cause their livers to wither away into pecans; or stealing billions from seniors. So get with it!  You too can be a PowerPoint Ranger!

Yanky Doodle

Sleep, You Abandoned Me

A Poem by M.W. Thomas

Sleep, you abandoned me.  Why?

For whose sake?

For what temptation of wine or song?

What misdemeanor did I commit against slumber?

Was it the slip of light that I allowed to escape the sash?

Was it the squeaky weathercock I refused to oil last Autumn?

Was it the Sartre I read past my bedtime?

A Neanderthal entered my cave, a brute

He demanded my ration of your elixir

And laid across from me

A stone knife carefully placed across his chest

Yes, it will be 200,000 years before

I adorn myself with my own talisman of plastic insomnia

Pythagoras!  Do not even you have a theorem for my nocturnal bliss?

Scholars!  Academics!  Shall my slumbers be Form, Universal, or Substance?

Michael, Gabriel, Rafael, bring me your heavenly wisdom!

I fought on the savanah

Against lions

Against hyenas

Against the other apes

But mostly against the women

They tamed me and commanded that I toil in the light and sleep in the dark.

With broken back and broken dreams, I do neither

The King has a City with Great Walls

Twelve feet high and six miles long

He demands husbanded animals and great yield;

He demands fields of grain and great yield.

The City fails

The King from the North arrives with a great army

No one sleeps.  Many die

Where is my blanket?  I am cold

My limbs seize hard and I cry from my toes

My fingers drag at the fabric and do no better work by night than by day

I smell like rotten eggs

A little dog comes; she paws and nests, then settles in beside me

Her nap is unlabored and sweet

Awake!

Shall we go to the middens and see what we can find?

The Philosopher laughs and calls me a Pauper

The Poet laughs and calls me a Pretender

My little dog heels and follows and wonders what we are getting to eat

I wish for soup

I wish for soup too hot to eat

I wish I could have slept through his politics

His boorishness; his wars

We are uniquely loved by God says he

Yet he makes me toss and turn at night

In fits of fear

And in the miasma of my own farts

I was once a bright lad

Now everyone is smarter than me

Who are you?  Who are you that now push me aside?

Go away sweet little dog.  Find another home.  I can no longer care for you.

If only Laughter were my Insomnia!

Though a joke, this misadventure nevertheless a nightmare

And for all its humor, the punchline unfit for children:

Cursed be life, and blessed be death!

My pharmacist is a good counter

A-One, A-Two, A-Three!

He sings as he spoons out my pills

Like Lawrence Welk counting down the start of Autumn Leaves

My capsulated victuals come in all colors of the rainbow

And fill my cabinets

I feast on them according to directions

They do not bring sleep

The Interpretation of My Dreams is the Decay of Humanity

Sleep is a wicked mistress

Sleep, you abandoned me

Yanky Doodle

Drew a blank today.  If you think of a caption, send it to Marco Rubio.  He needs all the help he can get.