What is the difference between a Jew and a ...

[tarbaby]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsFrBUYtvUE

[Doreen Peri]

This is a complaint? Whatchyou complainin about, brotha? This is great! I'm watching this now... I love this! Who is that?

I've embedded it for you. I fixed the configuration on the boards so Youtube embed code works! Pretty cool, huh?

<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/FsFrBUYtvUE"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/FsFrBUYtvUE" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>

[tarbaby]

I used to be a truck driver and Tarbaby was one of the CB handles that I used. burrhead[/url] I never thought much about the racial implications of it. I just liked the Brer Rabbit story a whole lot. So anyway sooner or later some trucker would get to calling me burrhead. I thought it was kind of funny. But I have no issues with my hair.

This Zen thing has helped me a lot. I was very angry. But I did not get the adrenalin shakes.

[Doreen Peri]

OK. I see.

Who's the performer?

Izzat you? Hmmm?

[stilltrucking]

No dammit ( I have done it again he thinks...was it punctuation or just poor choice of words?)
sorry to confuse you Doreen

The guy is just a guy doing a cover of the Grateful Dead song Ship Of Fools. Man that title has a long history in literature. Sometimes I wonder if the dead song was based on Katherine Anne Porter's novel Ship of Fools.

I was complaining about my anger Doreen. That song was the only way I could express myself at that point in time.

I liked it too
at first it sounded so alien because I expected to hear Jerry Garcia's voice.

I am happy to hear you thought it was great, me too but I am so dumb about music.

[stilltrucking]

Katherine Anne Porter only wrote one novel. But it was a duzzie. It was called Ship of Fools

There is also a painting by Bosch of the same title and of course Teddy's opus.

Ted is no Katherine Anne Porter.

Blow me down! It's the Rime of the Ancient Unabomber
Move over, James Cameron -- Ted Kaczynski has a boat story to tell! Plus: What's that moose doing in my pool? The backstroke!


- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Douglas Cruickshank
August 26, 1999 |

Well, he's no Jack Henry Abbott, but as prison prose stylists go Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, now serving a life sentence in a Colorado maximum-security pen, does have a certain je ne sais quoi. Last week it was announced that Kaczynski had written a "parable" for Off!, a SUNY Binghamton student magazine. Rogues' Gallery is happy to report that the result is explosive, but not in a good way.

His story, with the evocative if not quite original title "Ship of Fools," is a tale of a ship being taken north by a maniacal Dr. Evil-esque captain and an insane crew. The passengers, however, are so consumed by bitching and moaning about various minor injustices they observe on the ship that they can't get it together to prevent the nutter driving the thing from racing into -- as Kaczynski so belletristically evokes it -- "more and more perilous waters" filled with "icebergs and dangerous floes."

Gosh, Batman! Could the ship symbolize the world, the passengers symbolize the citizens of the world and the captain and crew, like, the government and corporate leaders? Whoa, and they say the ocean's deep!

OK, so it's a bit clunky as parables go, but then subtlety was never Kaczynski's strong suit. As the story reaches cruising speed, we see the mad bomber's gift emerge -- a fine ear for authentic dialogue:

"'Shiver me timbers,' said an able seaman, "if this ain't the worst voyage I've ever been on [Shades of "Sloop John B"!] ... Every time I reef the foresail I blamed-near freeze me fingers.'"

You can almost taste the salt air, can't you, matey? Kaczynski, it turns out, has a hitherto unheralded flair for portraying the sexual demimonde. Here we have a bosun complaining about being taunted for his proclivities: "Yesterday the first mate called me a 'fruit' just because I suck cocks. I have a right to suck cocks without being called names for it!" Well, blow me off the fo'c'sle! (And let's go easy on the exclamation marks, shall we, Ted!)

The doomed hero of his story is an innocent and enlightened cabin boy -- a non-biting, ocean-going Mini-me, you might say -- who tries to put things in perspective for the wayward seafarers. "You all have good reasons to complain," the young feller says brightly. "But ... if we keep going north we're sure to be wrecked ... and then your wages, your blankets, and your right to suck cocks won't do any good, because we'll all drown." (Frankly, Ted, we're already drownin' and there are several more pages of your story to go.) "But no one paid any attention to him, because he was only the cabin boy," Kaczynski continues in winning, woebegone fashion.

Then why not plant an explosive device in the damnable limeys' rum rations and blow them to kingdom come, huh, Ted? Ahoy! It would sort of kill two birds with one stone (to use a phrase you may wish to employ in your next literary outing). It would give your story some frickin' action and at the same time get rid of the Dr. Evil captain and his crew of hell-bent psychotics racing into the ice-blue maw of eternity. Ah, well.

Be that as it may, junior-college psychology classes should have a field day with Kaczynski's foray into fiction. What remains of his subconscious is working overtime throughout. The cocksucking bosun keeps poking his head up: "Why should I have to keep cocksucking in the closet? Why should I be called a fruit? Ain't I as good as everyone else?" Of course you are, Ted, but you're also a loony maniac murderer, see, which is why your Holden Caulfield-meets-the-Weather Underground posturing never really played.

But whatever points he may have to make about the breakneck pace at which society is sailing into oblivion get lost in the humorless, chug-chug tedium of his little literary Titanic


Spoiler alert! Stop reading here if you want the surprise ending to be just that. Ted being Ted, there's not a happy ending. The ship crashes and all are drowned. Why? Because the passengers allow themselves to be bought off by Dr. Evil, who remedies their minor complaints while pushing the ship full-steam ahead to icy catastrophe. Even our fellating friend the bosun, who'd been granted the right to "suck cocks publicly after dark," goes down into the sea's eternal darkness.

http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:Gl ... cd=2&gl=us

[stilltrucking]

http://www.chicagoabc.org/ship_of_fools.htm

My two favorite characters in Katherine Anne Porter's novel are the German Jew wearing his Iron Cross so from world war one so proudly. He was sure that Germany would never turn on her Jews. He was also sure that this 'nonsense" of H*tler's would not last.

The other character was the Ship's doctor. After a childhood of believing that all the evil in the world was in Germany, Porter's sympathetic portrayal of that compassionate doctor made me realize that Germans were all to human just like us.

These days there are kids growing up like me, but they believe all the evil in the world is in the USA.

I do my part to restore america to god's grace.
I wear sixteen american flag lapel pins
I have an american flag tattooed on my forehead
and i have a bumper sticker on my peterbilt that says
"Bring It On"
and twenty seven made in China 99 cent yellow magnetic ribbons that say
"Support our Troops"

Don't tell me I am not Patriotic
"Mission Accomplished"
Now that would make a nice bumper sticker or tee shirt motto.