100th Post!

So it occurred to me that this post would be my 100th, and I thought I should serve up something special to mark the centepostal moment.

And that's what I've been doing for the past week — all week — trying to come up with something to write that would be worthy of a hundredth post.

A whole week lost to cogitatin' and ruminatin', and what do I have to show for it? A whole lot of NOTHING. No fanfare, no pageantry, no hoo-ha, no hullaballoo, no pomp and circumstance. No ceremonial recitations, no commemorative poem inscribed in marble, no unveiling of statuary, no 21-gun salutes, no ritual sacrifices to the sun god Ra. I collapsed under the pressure of the moment (that's a small "m" moment, until further notice), and all you get are these lousy T-shirts.

(available in white and ash grey, all proceeds will go to the Phutatorius & Co. World Domination Fund, all rights reserved, all liabilities disclaimed)

Here's hoping Post 101 goes better. In the meantime, I'm going to undertake a searching review of the base-10 numbering system, once we take power. It's so arbitrary that we celebrate the 100th iteration of anything -- if we were on a base-12 or base-16, we'd be honoring the 144th or the 256th, and no one would be complaining. 100 is just an artifact of history. I think it's worth spending some time poring over the numbers and selecting a numbering system that balances the competing goals of (1) supplying a sufficient quantity of milestone parties to satisfy the drooling masses, and (2) keeping those of us who have to stage these celebrations from tearing our hair out.

Anyway, 100th post — yippee. Go buy yourself a frickin' T-shirt.

How Could They?

Not Adriana! I find myself bereft and bereaved. Not only is this a tragic and unfair result, but I'll surely miss the Hispano-Jersey flounce-and-pout stylings of Celia Juarez, sister of Adobe Fortifications Foreman Edgardo Juarez, and inspired real-time interpreter of Miss Drea de Matteo's lines during this period of illness.

Celia, I can't see you as any other character. It is therefore with a certain bittersweet sentiment that I dismiss you today. Go then, Celia — vamoose, as they say in your country — get thee hence to some other, more rewarding existence. Your stage talents are wasted on entertaining the pale, unshaven, pock-marked likes of me. Maybe we'll meet again, someday after the Ascendancy.

Honestly, it hasn't even been two weeks, and I'm dying here. I don't know how Howard Hughes did it.

Chickenpox!

I've got them, too. SON OF A BITCH. We'll be rescheduling the hard-sell to the Yali tribesmen. Everything pushed back three weeks. 'Saright — I'll just hole up and watch some video. PePe just gave me the first 5.5 seasons of The Sopranos on DVD — pirated through a cousin of his in Lima. He didn't have to pay them a cent.

Problem is they're dubbed over in Spanish by a handful of this cousin's scofflaw friends. They sound stoned out of their minds and are giggling half the time. They do the men's voices all buffoonish and the girls' in falsettos. It's hard to listen to, and I don't understand what they're saying, anyway. So I've hired away some of the English speakers on the crew to come over and retranslate the dubbed Spanish back into English, in real time. It's not ideal, but it's television. I've got a couple of the domestics doing the women's roles: some of them are pretty talented.

Frickin' 'pox. I can't stand it. Whatever. I'm clocking out. This laptop's got my legs itching again.

Chickenpox!

Sea Monkey Brother Jarvis has the chickenpox! What a stunning reversal for the Terrarium Terror. No sooner is he given a name than he's covered in a raft of unsightly blotches. What is it with my peeps getting sick like this?

Ho there, Phutatorius! you say. Why all this consultation with doctors? Don't you know chickenpox when you see it?

Well, I do. At least I think I would, but on a dude with such a small amount of surface area, you're talking about only 10-15 button-sized marks, from head to toe. So for all I know it could have been a breakout of acne.

Anyway, all we can do right now is keep The Boy comfortable until the virus clears. I got a good-sized tub of Noxzema, scooped a big wad of it out, and set it down half-full for him to sit in. He spends most of the day up to his neck in moisturizer, and he seems content (or at least the glass is muffling his complaints).

The real bitch of it is I wanted to take his picture for The Yali Presentation. He is, after all, the much-discussed Little Man from their Prophecy. But I want to put my best foot forward here, and I'd rather that he didn't look all unkempt and diseased.

I guess there's always PhotoShop.

The Morning After

Well, the late morning, anyway . . .

If you hadn't gathered as much from my last post, it turns out I was really lit up last night. In fact, things got so bad that at one point I was out on a corner of the Patio, mashing pretty hard with a chick that I thought was the spitting image of Flora Pachado (the Most Beautiful Girl I've Ever Seen in Peru, if you remember).

Now I'm told that the Object of Last Night's Misdirected Lust ("OLNML") was in fact a giant stuffed panda that we had raffled off to the kids earlier in the day. The girl who had won it had (thankfully) gone home to bed with her grandmother, but her parents were still at the party and were planning to take it home later that night.

PePe's got a bottle of Woolite and is cleaning the OLNML off right now — this wouldn't be that big a project, but apparently I had a mouthful of Oreos when I moved in for the kill. I'm all for just getting little Juanita a new panda bear, but PePe thinks this one is still salvageable.

I've written up a blog post on this because I think there's some wisdom in this story, and I want to draw it out for you. So here goes: if I were some lesser form of being — say, a politician — I'd be trying to cover up this Incident. But as you all should know so well by now, Brothers and Sisters, life is all about having Incidents — and the number and nature of my Incidents are what make my life in particular so rich. Persons (note that I didn't write "men," Sisters) who are truly Great don't need to cover up their foibles, their indiscretions. They lay their lives open for the world to see, because they know that when all the assets and liabilities are tabled and calculated out, they're still Great.

So I got to third base last night with Somebody Else's Stuffed Panda. What of it? Some years down the road we'll not only be laughing about this: I'll have commissioned some world-renowned artist to recreate the scene in oils for the Capitol Rotunda. Count on it, People.

¡Cinco de MAyo!

Oh oh oh ohhh ohoh ho ho am I hamered. Fuapachewita, Bros and Sissses! That's Spanish, you know —, specail Phutatorius diale3ct for ";celebrate goood times cm'on!""

So I gave the bulding crerws the day off for Cinco de Mayo. Not sure what that's all about, but I've been to enough Mexican restraunts to be aware of the holiday and when its celebrated. Chalk me up as a BIG fan of holidays that have their dates built into their names. When I get my crap in order and overhaul the calendr, we're going to chuck Easter and Thangksiving and Election Day too: all that shit in favor of moreeasily scheduled festival days. You have to have to figure that there was a month/day when Christ came back from the dead, when the pilgrims sat down with the INdians for dinner. Somebody just needs to roll up their sleeves and DO THE FRICKIN' RESERCH. Once we have precise calendar dates, we can settle these wandering hollidays onceandforall. If the Detroit Lions and Macy's don't like it, bring on BLOOMINGDALE'S AND THE B ROWNS. ¿How you likeme now, bitches? Worrrrrrd up.

Anyway, any excuse to trhow a party, right? Awwwwwright. I told the crews to bring over their families. Stocked up on José Cuervo, broke out the quesdillo maker, even brought a projection screen out on the patio to show last week's Sabado Gigante off the TiVO. I know, I know, you here all this talk about "assimilation," but sometimes it's not the worsdt thing in the world to give people a taste of home. Ya know? For the muchachos I picked up a couple piñatas at a party warehous: one shaped like a donkeyyy and the other some dude in a suit — the tag on it said "Tom Tancredo." Never heard of the guy, but he sure fires up a crowd full of MeXcans a party. Even the adults were lining up to take a swing at him.

We had ourselves one raucous little fiesta, let me tell you. I always say you know a good party when the cops arrive, and you know a better party when they stick around, get jacked up on margritas and dry-hump the topiary nudes. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeha!

Now I don't go looking to pooop on a partay, but here are two bummer: (1) I didn't make much progress on the Yali presentation today — or yesterday or the day befor thaat; and (2) Sea--Monkey Jarvis was under the wether and notable to join us for the party. Not sure what's ailing Lil' Bro, but I've got calls in to a doctor and a vetenarian. Should know something by tomorrow.

BedTime now for El Jefe. All that sangria's taking it's toll==

PePe's Back

I'm writing from a Motel 6 (Official Hotel Chain of the Ascendancy, mind you) in Atlanta. Had to drive down here to pick up PePe, who was released yesterday from the Centers for Disease Control. Well, I didn't have to drive: we could have flown him up to New England, but flying's been a bitch for Phutatorius & Co. lately (see "Stupid &#$@* No-Fly List!," Dec. 2, 2005). And I wanted to show my Piper some love: he did, after all, have to spend forty days getting pin-stuck by government nurses under fluorescent lamps.

PePe doesn't seem much the worse off for the experience. His illness left some pock marks on his face, but I've told him — half-kidding, of course — that we'll just ask the sculptors to chisel some updates into the busts and statues I've commissioned for the world's major cities.

PePe tells me he thinks his diplomatic foray into Yali territory went pretty well. There's a bit of a divide among the tribal elders re how I fit into their Prophecy. I'm putting together a presentation that I think will make an authoritative case; PePe says the elders have a retreat planned for mid-May, and I hope to have my pitch together by them. The problem is I'm accustomed to working in PowerPoint, and it's not clear to me they'll have teleconferencing at this retreat. I mean, if you already live in the wilderness as part of a hunter-gatherer society, where do you go when you want to "get away from distractions?" Seems to me you could go either way: to a prime hotel in The Big City, or to an Even More Remote Location that doesn't even have electricity, much less the sort of communications infrastructure that would enable me to run slides from one hundred and forty time zones away.

Logistics aside, though, the point is that the Yali are willing to listen. If I can get them to buy in, that's one society I can dominate without even striking a blow. And who knows? Maybe they can fight.

As for PePe, he used up all his sick time + ten personal days while he was in quarantine. I could make allowances for him, but what kind of message would that send to the rest of The Staff? If he can show me he was working during some of this down time, I'll set it off against his out-of-office totals. Absent that, my dedicated and diligent Piper will just have to settle for winning April's "Employee of the Month" award — and the much-coveted $50 gift certificate to Chili's that comes with it.

Here's to you, PePe: Piper, Sidekick, Emissary, Trouper. Let's get you back home.

Naming Contest Winner

I know, I know, people: I've let this go on too long. It's been over two months since I announced two finalists in the Contest To Name My Sea Monkey Brother (see "Contest Finalists 'Named'," Feb. 22, 2007).

Announcing a winner is long overdue, then — both for the contestants and for my Sea Monkey Brother, who I'm sure would welcome a bit of closure on the Nomenclature Front.

At this point I'd like to ask that all of you hold your reactions until the end of the post here. I anticipate just a smidgen of outrage here, and I want the opportunity to explain the situation before the hate mail rolls in.

All right, then. Here's goes.

The winner is . . . ME!!!

I've named my brother myself. It happened a couple of days ago, and quite by accident. I walked by his tank, stopped, took a long look at him, and the name came to me: JARVIS. He just looks like a Jarvis. There's no way around it. He's Jarvis. I looked my brother in the eye on Tuesday, called him Jarvis, and now I can't look at him and see anyone else but Jarvis. It's almost like I had some kind of divine visitation on this score.

Over the past 48 hours I've fought a little bit of a battle with myself on this. I did pledge, after all, to award naming rights to the best contest entry. At the same time, however, in light of this sudden, crystal-clear revelation (which I think could well qualify as an upper-case-M Moment for me, by the way) it would be a crime to call my Sea Monkey Brother anything but Jarvis (or an affectionate nickname to be determined at a later date). So Jarvis it is.

Plus I've been thinking: I never did say I couldn't enter the contest on equal terms with the rest of you. And for that matter, I didn't close off the pipeline of entries when I named my two finalists back in February. On the contrary, I affirmatively solicited more entries. There's no reason why I couldn't submit my idea. And so I did. And I win.

I'm thinking I'll take myself out for a steak dinner.

Consolation prizes are due, of course, to those Fabulous February Finalists, Magdalena in Mauritius and Chumsley in Oxford. To Maggie I intend to forward a digital copy of the bootleg video I made of a performance of The King & I on Broadway. This was a show from the 1996 revival, with Lou Diamond Phillips playing the King. Great stuff: I had terrific orchestra seats and caught all of the first and most of the second act before they confiscated my Camcorder. To Chumsley, a round trip ticket from Oxford to Limerick, redeemable any weekday between May and October.

Content-appropriate prizes, I should think.

All right, then. If any of you still think I've double-crossed you, have at me. I can take it.