List: Words That Rhyme With 'Smurf' DEFINITIONS - Second Set

Back to business--; the second set of DEFINITIONS for our list of a hundred words that rhyme with 'Smurf'.

hurf - a violent procreative action a grurf will inflict upon its comrade grurfs. The grurf will impale its horn into the rival grurf’s gnatlike wings, then through another grurf’s wings (up to fifteen in a row has been observed by naturalists), twist it all about, & then sit there in a heap until they begin to mold. This is the only way a grurf can reproduce naturally in the wild.

iouyurf - 1) a very tall sunflower said to resemble a young beardless James A. Garfield; 2) Debt that has been temporarily paid with the seeds from the iouyurf flower as a “placeholder;” 3) The oil pressed from the iouyurf seeds, which can be boiled and poured from a large cauldron onto the heads of one’s debtors.

oourf - onomatopoetic word referring to the sound a grurf makes when it is hurfing.

glurf - a species of yuppie who is not actually allergic to wheat gluten, but goes around telling everyone he or she is, making impossible special requests to caterers or restaurants, and diagnosing all of their friends as gluten-intolerant also.

furf - 1) a stock tip; 2) a gambling tip; 3) a sex-position tip; 4) a tip about how to successfully cheat at clurf.

sklurf - 1) an immigrant who has accidentally immigrated to his own country; 2) the name of the “chinatown” district of sklurfs, usually located in the center of the city they are originally from.

hururf - a grunt of approval from the town council of Scott, Arkansas, when it has unanimously voted to adjourn for the day and take their kids to Chuck E Cheese’s.

scurf - a nasty disease caught on alien spaceships, usually caught when there is an insufficient supply of human baby blood to provide the crew.

jjurf - 1) the bells of freedom ringing from coast to coast, eagles soaring, flags waving, and an old soldier saluting a parade; 2) despair.

curf - 1) a thing or no-thing, something or not something; 2) a very large investment project costing more than a curzillion dollars.

"NARWHALS": New Favorite Signs from Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity

This is real. And here are a few more ideas I had for rally signs that I never put up:

And here are some featured in the epic Huffington Post slideshow of rally signs that made me feel good:

That last one is a personal campaign of mine. And here! I'm thrilled to see someone was either inspired by my sign suggestions (I proposed "Protect the Third Amendment! No More Quartering!") or came to the same idea independently:

Unrelated plug: Friends Around the Campfire's Stuck Home Syndrome now available as a $5.99 digital album. Narwhals!

Boxer Briefly Noted!

Some quick carrion for CULTURE BUZZARDS!

Joaquin Phoenix was faking it all along (his descent into craziness & rap career, &c) all for Casey Affleck's mockumentary. & fooling Letterman & Ebert (who hated the movie before he got it.) I think of his po-mo 21st Century Celebrity-as-Performance Art as an interesting B-side to Lady GaGa.

Last year there was Dante's Inferno the Video Game. Now, Legendary Pictures is producing a huge-budget Paradise Lost 3D (thanks Mr Islas for the tip, the write-up from Atlantic is here.) I can't wait for someone to take on William Blake's Jerusalem. And speaking of 3D, Werner Herzog's first foray into the dimension will be a documentary about cave art in France called Caves of Forgotten Dreams.

Miss LaFuente turned us on to these Funny or Die "Drunk Histories", where very drunk people explain famous historical events & famous people (like Michael Cera & Crispin Glover) act them out. Cera's amazing portrayal of Alexander Hamilton ("Listen I can't reconcile killing someone with my political beliefs, but I can't reconcile my political beliefs with not killing someone.") got us wondering if Hamilton really did deliberately not fire at Aaron Burr in their famous duel. According to reputable internet sources, the issue is contested. Hamilton keeps coming up recently, I cursed him in the lyrics to my song "Corn Whiskey" (set to the tune of "The Times They Are A'Changin'") featured in our work-in-progress Corn Liquor songbook.

I mentioned on the Lewis Carroll blog about the studios KILLING Marylin Manson's Lewis Carroll movie (a psycho-sexual thriller about his fiery passion for child Alice Liddell, years in the making & starring the beautiful Lily Cole) after internet audiences recoiled from the nasty trailer, read about it here. Scholars of the real non-pedophiliac Rev. Charles Dodgson collectively exhale in relief.

I recommend the article in the New Yorker about Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook who's about to be movie-fied, played by that actor from The Squid & the Whale and Adventureland, Jesse Eisenberg. If you're someone who somewhat trusts facebook, there's some shocking shit in there.

Speaking of bio-pics, when is someone going to make the James A. Garfield one?

Only a few months before Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows PART ONE comes out, & now that the shooting is finished, did you see Emma Watson's shedding of her Hermoine curls:

I'm very curious to watch the careers of the main Harry Potter children, they're all such good actors. I only post Watson's Twiggy look because we were discussing it while Miss Minnie Mary Molly cut the remaining red off of Grainne's blonde roots last night. M.M.M. is giving twenty-dollar haircuts to friends & friends-of-friends to save up & buy her own electric ukulele for our Friends Around the Campfire "band." If you need a stylish trim & wish to donate to the cause, look her up. Here's the logo I made for the back of her card:

Jerry's dead, Phish sucks, get a haircut! &, Friends Around the Campfire now has a facebook group you can "like": HERE. Be a friend of Friends Around the Campfire!

Bearded Art: Bearded Panda Presidents

This artist, Alexander Barrett, has imagined all forty-four presidents as pandas.
INCLUDING THE BEARDED PRESIDENTS:

More at his website.

Special Report: The Ages of the Sunday Comics Writers published in the Reno Gazette-Journal

Everytime I come to my parents house, I am struck by how backwards the Sunday Comics page is in the Reno Gazette-Journal. Their line-up has remained almost unchanged since before I could read. I remember that, when Dilbert became popular in the 90s, readers petitioned to have it added. And there was a bizarre debacle around that same time when they tried to drop Doonesbury & readers sent in a flood of angry letters. (Note to Comics editors: never try to drop Doonesbury.) The strips the Gazette-Journal publishes are so old school, the worst example of traditionalism not making way for new talent. Not publishing Get Fuzzy, for instance, must be the equivalent of a public library not carrying Harry Potter. Recently, in research for my new comics projects, I've been reading classic Garfield books on the toilet. I have been told that Garfield - which used to be very stylish & witty, & now one of the most embarrassing things ever published - is now written by a committee & that Davis is on life support. According to Wikipedia, Jim Davis married a second wife in 2000 at age 55 & had three more children, so it seems like at least one part of the old man is still working. I'm afraid he's probably the man responsible for Garfield's sad late era.

What was the point of this? Yes, newspapers, you're an endangered species anyway, you need to stay current with the Sunday funnies! I was also wondering how old some of these comics writers are - & I'm not being ageist, obviously some of the funniest people to have lived have been old as Methuseleh. But when these guys have been pumping out daily comics for so many decades, some of the quality is going to thin. Curling up with a cup of coffee on Sunday with this collection of has-beens leaves you feeling so empty. I decided to look up the ages of every comic strip writer in the Reno Gazette-Journals horrible Sunday Comics section:

Classic Peanuts - He would be 86, & lived for many decades in Santa Rosa! Today they just publish reruns.
Garfield - Jim Davis currently resides in Albany, Indiana, & is 63.
For Better of For Worse - Lynn Johnston lives in Corbeil, Ontario, age 61.
Dilbert - The most recent addition to the RGJ's Sunday Comics. Scott Adams is a vegetarian & will turn 52 years old next month. He lives in Dublin, in Contra Costa County. Dilbert celebrated its 20th Anniversary this year.
Cathy - Cathy Guisewite is 58 & lives in Los Angeles.
Hagar the Horrible - Dik Browne died in 1989 at age 71. His son Chris, aged 55, now draws the especially unfunny Hagar. He lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which Forbes magazine named "#1 Best Small Place For Business And Careers in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009".
The Family Circus - Bil Keane is 86 years old & has lived in Paradise Valley, Arizona, since he began drawing The Family Circus forty-nine years ago.
The Wizard of Id - More like, the Wizard of STUP-Id. Grant Parker & Johnny Hart co-created it in 1964 & both died in 2007 (at ages 86 & 76.) Jeff Parker, Grant's son, took over in 1997 & lives in Front Royal, Virginia. Does anyone know when he was born?
Shoe - Jeff MacNelly died in 2000 at age 52 of Lymphoma. He lived in Flint Hill, Virginia, & later in Key West, which is also home to Ernest Hemingway's six-toed cats. Shoe is currently written by Chris Cassatt, Gary Brookins, & Susie MacNelly, shadowy humorless figures of darkness.
Doonesbury - Garry Trudeau is sixty years old & lives in New York City. He was the first comic strip artist to win a pulitzer prize, in 1975.
Sally Forth - Greg Howard created Sally Forth in 1982 & passed it over to Francesco Marciuliano in 1999. Marciuliano lives in New York City & also writes for the Onion. The Wikipedia does not tell us any of their birthdates, but it does explain that "Sally's name is a play on words - 'to sally forth' means to set out on an adventure." (It occurs to me that this strip was added to the RGJ later in my life also...)
Mother Goose & Grim - Mike Peters is 65 & lives in Dayton, Ohio.
B.C. - Johnny Hart is the same cartoonist from The Wizard of Id, & his daughter Perri Hart & grandson Mason Mastroianni took it over in 2007.
Ziggy - Tom Wilson lives! & is 78 in Montgomery, Ohio! But Ziggy has been drawn for two decades by his son Tom Wilson II (pictured to the right), who lives in Loveland, Ohio.
Dennis the Menace - Hank Ketcham died in 2001 at 81 years old. It is now written by Marcus Hamilton and Ron Ferdinand. The punchline in today's strip is "Her cookies are NAG-FREE."
Blondie - Chic Young created Blondie in 1930, & died in 1976 at age 72. His son Dean Young, age 70, is the current head writer. The head artist since 2002 is John Marshall, who lives in Binghampton, New York.
Prince Valliant - Hal Foster died in 1982 at age 89. He was a Canadian & lived most of his life in Chicago. William Randolph Hearst allowed Foster to retain full ownership of Valliant when he commisioned the strip in 1936. Current writer Mark Schultz, age 53, lives in Northeast Pennsylvania. Current illustrator Gary Gianni is 54 & a life-long Chicagoan. I didn't realize that Prince Valliant has had a continuous narrative since the 1930s. I have never successfully read a whole strip.
Beetle Bailey - Mort Walker is 85 & still does Beetle Bailey with his sons Greg & Brian. His studio in Connecticut employs six of his nine children. I love his website here.
Frank & Ernest - Bob Thaves died in 2006 at age 82. It is currently done by (beginning to recognize a pattern?) his son Tom Thaves.
Marvin - Tom Armstrong created Marvin in 1982, & lives in Florida. Why is it so hard to find out anything about the mysterious Mr Armstrong on the internet??
Born Loser - Art Samsom died in 1990 at age 70. His son, Chip, now writes the strip from a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio.

What have we learned! My thesis that these stale comics were drawn by old people was MOSTLY WRONG. More than half of them have been taken over by younger old men, & a full eight of them are done by the original artists' sons or daughters. Who knew that comic strips were such a patriarchal business, each one of these shadows of thier father like a powerless Kim Jong-Il, daily toiling to make America laugh. I wish the best to all of the above mentioned working artists & funnymen. But in the words of Robert Allen Zimmerman (Age 67), "Don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall!"

Art: The Muse Monica Lewinsky

The artist Annie Kevan painted an oil-on-paper series of All the Presidents' Girlfriends, about ninety percent of which were from John F Kennedy. Only a tiny number of them dated the bearded presidents (Garfield's Lucia Gilbert Calhoun), which I chalk up to the higher morality of the bearded presidents as well as their discretion. Ariston Anderson writes: "At first glance, the collection of portraits FAS Contemporary's Volta booth appears to be a wall of extremely beautiful women throughout the ages, each one quickly created in delicate strokes of oil paint. But then Monica Lewinsky's face pops out at you and is that Paula Jones?" It also contains William Rufus DeVane King, the sexy congressman James Buchanan (America's only bachelor president) lived with after the white house, Washington & Jefferson's black girlfriends, & a surprising number of beauties from Dwight Eisenhower.

I'm fascinated by Monica Lewinsky as a muse, I use to have this glossy photo of her taped up in my parents' camper, which usually took people awhile to recognize. I can't find this photo anywhere on the web! It was a photo-shopped photo shoot from some magazine like Vanity Fair or even Cosmo, I think she's posing with a pink umbrella & a poodle, or something like that. It's an amazing shot. Send it to me if you can find it!

The Sad Narrative of the Big-Ass Beard on that Rutherford B. Hayes

Happy Presidents' Day! It is too infrequently noted that we pay too too little attention to our leaders in this country. How about a little reverence for our great presidents once & awhile! The slick new whitehouse.gov website has a fancy feature with a SLIDESHOW of the 44 presidents, they are even kind enough to crop off the tops of their foreheads for our convenience. I wanted to combine all of the things we love on this blog - Lizard People, Presidents, Beards, Fashion, & History - into one spectacular historical doggerel poem in honor of bearded lizard presidents. Kowtow to us, & spend a few moments this Presidents' Day to learn about democratic leadership.

The Sad Narrative of the Big-Ass Beard on that Rutherford B. Hayes

There once was a man named Rutherford Hayes,
A metrosexual, he shaved three times a days,
Like a baby's butt, soft as a vagina,
You could ride that wave from California to Carolina,
And he knew if he rubbed it in just the right place,
He would grow up to be elected the President of the United States.

Now one day he was walking thru the amber maize,
That gay savant known as Rudy Be Hayes,
And he came across a humble wasp called Twitty van Titt,
Let me tell you about this Twitty, he was full of monkey shit,
A bumble in appearance, but inside an evil sorcerer.
All yellow & fuzzy, he was envious of Rutherford's virgin face,
The type of chihuahua pate, if you rubbed in just the right place,
It could be stamped on the currency of the United States.

That jealous Twitty van Titt, summoned all the spirits of the days,
And placed a huge curse on the face of Rutherford B. Hayes,
He could shave it twenty times with the sharpest of razors,
But his beard would grow thicker than a NASA space shuttle.
You need a 4-D map to get out of the jungle on that lengthy face,
And you'll never grow up to be elected the President of the United States.

But Rudy Be Hayes was a gay little turnip,
And had saved for the fates a few gay little tricks,
So when he ran against Sam Tilden in 1876,
The New York Governor, with his feminine cheeks,
Won the popular vote, but was caught in the lady's lavatory huffing a whippet,
And despite the buzzing voodoo of Twitty Van Titt,
Rutherford ushered in an age of wild bearded Presidents,
Garfield & Cleveland & Arthur & Harrison,
Men of action & courage, history written bold across their pates,
Bearded & handsome, & honored forever as Presidents of the United States.

Introducing: DEPARTMENT OF BEARDS!

All this talk of James A. Garfield & Chester A. Arthur & Bill Richardson & Herman Melville got me to thinking. So I am spearheading a new Department of Beards on this weblog (available in the sidebar), which will be partially historical (great beards thru time) & partially political. Bearded men are often misrepresented in the main stream media, mocked by comedians, & there is a repugnant bias in many workplaces. For instance, when Mel Gibson was filming Apocalypto, the article about how crazy he had become kept mentioning over & over again that he had grown a beard. Surely his anti-semetic rants was keener evidence, but I digress. BEARDS! Most if not all of the correspondents at www.itwaslost.org are among the bearded. Now, like our President in eighteen hours (Barack Obama), I cannot grow a full beard, so my support of beards is similar to my support of gayness: I support it politically, do what I can, blog about it until the blogosphere is ripped apart by gypsies, but fall short of penetration. BEARDS! It's 2009, I want to see a beard back in the White House by 2020!

The Inaugural Address: It will be better than Harrison's & worse than Lincoln's

Look, it's a countdown clock. Today is Bush's last day. There is really a lot being written everywhere about all the inaugural address. There's a great article in the New Yorker here, by Jill Lapore, which follows the art of writing the address thru James Garfield's re-reading of his predecessors, procrastinating, & writing about it in his diary for posterity. (Garfield is pictured to the right in a sexy hat.) And there's an extremely useful interactive feature at the New York Times here. It shows what words were most used for each of the addresses, which is a good way to skim them all for content. William Henry Harrison is always mentioned when inaugural addresses are discussed, because he had the longest speech, & he is our briefest reigning president, not unrelatedly: it was standing out in the cold to ramble on for two hours, that he contracted pneumonia & died. Harrison's most used word was "power." (Creepily, "power" is high on the list for Kennedy & Garfield, who also died in office. Obama, please avoid that word.) The word "America" is only popular with Harding, Nixon, Clinton & Bush.

List: Songs We Sang

I am in Portland, at their lovely huge old library with tall pink walls. Last night, I met my friend Mrs Smith & hiked for most of the afternoon in the country where those tall waterfalls go into the Columbia River. It's nice round there. It threatened rain, but we decided to put up our tent & be optimistic. No veggie dogs were roasted on no campfire. We hid in our tent with a box of wine for the entire night while impossible amounts of water fell from the sky. At one point, we made a dash to get the capo & the ukulele. If the omnipotent gods of music are curious & read blogs, here are some of the songs we sang:

-Longer boats are coming to win us (Cat Stevens)
-Where do the children play? (Cat Stevens)
-Indiana (David Yazbek)
-TOXICODENDRON
-EL CERRITO (coming soon to http://www.itwaslost.org/!!)
-some of our old Shakespeare numbers
-A la clare fontaine
-Dancing with the Mountains (John Denver)
-Others I forget about

Tonight, there will be some Portland Sacred Harp, followed by fire twirling at Reed College. Outward! Stop, drop & roll!

Sam Amidon's blog Speak, Peppery points us to these existential Garfield Without Garfield comics:

Song of Dung & Defenestration - Soul Ballad Version #2

No use to beat on the dull-drums
Let's be imagina-tive,
Each day is numbered
No good when slumbered
With only one life to live

-Ira Gershwin, lyrics to the Kurt Weill song "One Life to Live", from Lady in the Dark (1941)


Leighbor is a neighbor who does your labor.

-Pele, from a gmail chat, 3 April 2008.

Madam, I may be President of the United States, but my private life is nobody's damn business.

-21st President Chester A. Arthur

Attention to those of you with infinite patience for my increasingly surreal poetry readings, & home-computer recordings, oozing towards fulfilling a life goal of being included in the next Songs in the Key of Z. This may be the crown-jewel low point - my classic nonsense poem, Song of Dung & Defenestration, has been raped & mutilated, to the tune of my dying Yamaha PSR-500 Synthesizer. Mr Olaf Mary & Mr Epcar-Singer-Songwriter were kind enough to discover the accompaniment style "Soul Ballad #2", which is used to here to great effect. To read the original poem & hear an earlier recording of me chanting it, please visit this page: http://www.itwaslost.org/2007/10/song-of-dung-defenestration.html.
To hear the Soul Ballad #2 Version, listen right here right now!
It is also downloadable at this MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/ssandrigon. Or you can download it here.




And, as a weekend reading suggestion, Justin Davidson of New York Magazine discusses the oeuvre of the New York contemporary ensemble Alarm Will Sound, which includes several of my high-school friends. I can't wait to hear their nit-picky live version of Revolution #9, & the rest of their new 1969 project, which I'm told will include Berio's weird Beatles arrangements.

Bulletin: New Political Muder Ballad Posted

From:	S. Sandrigon
Date:	Nov 2, 2007 12:58 PM
Subject:	New Political Murder Ballad Posted
Body:	Fans & fanatics, Returning to the forgotten idiom - folk prophetic epic doggerel American tragicomic nonsense-political murder ballad - I post my Song of Dung & Defenestration, sung a capella at the corner public house. What are you up to these days, James? Oh, nothing, just revisiting forgotten idioms. Mellifluently, S. Sandrigon, prophetic poet & American National Bard P.S. The lyrics are here.

Song of Dung & Defenestration

My fatigue for the next war is no accident,
Hybrid helicopters have wounded my core & shield.
In heaven, when the first female president
Returns, her vulva will be snipped by the late James A. Garfield.

Are you ready for a Californian high-speed train?
To marry L.A. & S.F. in a culture of two-&-a-half hours?
I squeeze a lime in your cocktail of pain,
I will block funding for all beehives & your precious oxalis flowers.

Let's just ask her, she says she means no discord,
There's hummus all over her face, & blood on her token black cloak,
She says the revolt of laboratory bunnies was never seeking its own reward,
Now freeways usually clogged with traffic are choked in smoke.

When asked if she would attend the lost ballet, she danced a maidmarian,
She objectified objective music, & cursed the fin de siècle,
The politics of the super-rich are buried in carrion,
And she was discovered at six a.m. in plainclothes leaving the residence of a sumo wrestler.

Her daughter published a book about pregnant teenaged mosquito lepers,
It was a bestseller at Stanford, unlike the rest of you squares.
Our Lady of Past Winter had the bibacity to drink the Watergate Papers,
One righteous dude too many, a Knight of the Mannerheim Cross, & no one cares.

My man Tom was an avuncular uncle despite his penectomy,
And after they were divorced, her hemorrhoids were tossed to the furnace,
Leakage, Señor, poetry, however, arrogate my brain-child & blow me.
Only edible Porcini? those pigs should be allowed to turn around & return as.

Angels, Albion, diaphany! - & not too soon, but where's our heroine?
I hear her thru the wall discussing the coup.
Fleeing from the bent sword & grooviness, never Matisse's supine ruin,
My exclusive rights to programming cable soccer have been diluted due to the Russian flu.

She is seventeen years old, not so much eternally, but superficially.
I wonder, does it grow new leafs as fast as it loses the old ones?
Her voice-mail inbox is full, her anarchist friends are failing precipitously,
A guest in the guest-house, modern juggling, ages golden but beholden of puns.

I have licked the fleshy part of her thigh for the penultimate time!
So she will never be content with her secretaries, get them besmudged hence!
The cheesiest composers have found words to rhyme with Argentina,
But I loved her, the doctors know it, listen to them eructating the future's judgments.

This Hate Triangle - with Passenger Pigeons & the Bluebeard of the Silesian Railway - has vanished.
The cabaret has gotten boring since they banned heterosexual can-cans.
Like a muse, she advises me to keep repeating myself until I get noticed,
And like a Borscht-belt comedian, to keep copying jokes from the Romans.

An uncanny funeral with an uncanny drumbeat,
Her loudest broadcasts were insufficient to dike up the flashflood of Evangelical Environmentalism,
Your dominion to the end of the earth, no puny feat,
See your omniscience will hit the non-believers in the forehead as a sudden awesome paroxysm.

What were the motives for Hitler's vegetarian diet?
But now that she is dead, & trashing the presidential suite at the Hotel Dis,
I rejoice when the Western train is on time, & the road is spooky quiet,
With the cows I ruminate our infinite hours, no, I remember only her pelvis.