October 26, 2003
Return of the Ming

Results from our Haiku exercise have been overwhelming. Responses poured in like it was monsoon season. Two of the best have been posted for your reading pleasure. Read and learn.

I looked up to the
northern lit sky and I saw
my land calling me home.
                                             -tina

Painfully blackened
Aurora borealis
Is the northern sun
                                           -K

I was very touched by these. For those keeping track, the funeral action was brutal but what the fuck can you do. Eh? People die, we do not. Yet. More sunny expose on the human condition expected next week when Mingus continues to get older.

In better news, next weekend is Halloween and I am allowed to officially put on a nun's outfit and do whatever the fuck I want in it. And not get fired. This I am looking forward to. In other news, the Characters section is making progress. Check it. If you don't like your profile, complain bitterly.

October 22, 2003
Online Hiatus

Due to excessive funeral action in the life of the Mingus, including a serious planting in the Great White Yukon, The Daily Mingus will be on hold until Sunday or so.

Please, do not kill yourself when you discover this alarming fact. Mingus need not attend any more funerals. Rather, compose a haiku that you think sums up the relationship between life and death, and how that affects humans on a daily basis.

You have seventeen syllables.
Use the word:
northern
in the haiku

Write your heartfelt masterpiece now.

Or, if you think that's stupid, read the Weekly Mingus, which I still think is so fucking good I should get a Gold Pope Hat for writing it. It is the definitive way of the future. Maybe not definitive, but it certainly ties in to an ubertheory I've been working on entitled 'Humanity is Fucked and Will Soon Be Extinct'.

'Course, I read it to Chloe and she thought it was the stupidest thing I had ever written. But what the fuck does she know. You decide. Talk to you sometime round Sunday, after I'm done with all the pallbearing. Fuck. Yeah.

October 21, 2003
Just Like CNN

BTW your MingusTourette.com has been added to
The Bearded Wonder weblog -The Beard.

That's right, for those nerdy enough to care, this site is now nunt.com and also mingustourette.com. It's not a redirect, it's not a fuckaround, it's just straight up DNS magic. Brought to you by the same people that are thinking very very seriously about committing time and dollars to publishing Nunt, the book. They're a small group, but they're very serious about getting into the publishing industry and seem entranced by the possibilities of what Mingus Tourette could do for a one book publishing company. Something about the innate attraction between shotguns, American flags, Nuns and newspapers that excites them. They go well together. Or so the theory goes. So let's hope they get a little more hell bent on it and give it green flag and sometime in November we start revving the engines. If I prayed, I would pray for this. Somebody pray for me.

T he site continues evolving and I am happy to announce that we broke 4000 page views today, after a furious 85 hits last week. That's right, we're into CNN, Google and Maddox territory now. That's right, WE. We're a team. And soon, we can all sell out to Microsoft, who will rename the product MUNT, and we can laugh about the backroom deals while basting ourselves on a Caribbean beach as real Guatamalan nuns serve us turquoise daquiris. I've got it all planned out.

In other news, a friend of mine I haven't seen for a long time visited the site. He was somewhat confused by the various references to people he didn't know, like Chloe and Sweaty Charles, seeing as we haven't really talked for like nine years. So for him, the Assman, and all the other neophytes, there will be further evolution in the form of a 'Who's Who', or a 'Players' or a 'Cast' or a 'Nunt For Beginners' page. If you want your name in there with a good description, send it on in. Sweaty Charles: this means you. Give me your:

Name:
Occupation:
Ten Word Bio:
Relation to Mingus:

And soon, the world will be clearer, and one of these weeks, this site will crack a hundred hits!!! I am rock fucking solid just thinking about it.

October 20, 2003
Northward Bound

The strangeness of the weekend's funeral processions would be far more amusing if it weren't for the phone call I received last night from my own mother informing me that my uncle had shipped off for good on Sunday morning. This puts me in a good position for attending two funerals in one week. It also puts me in Whitehorse, land of the motherfucking frozen North somewhere around Thursday.

While explaining this unendingly enjoyable situation to my supervisor at work, I was asked the one question that everyone asks in the uncomfortable silence that trails the mention of a funeral.

Were you close?

The answer I have now is: we weren't so close in the last five years, but he was always around in my childhood, and he would send me books on writing and politics, and he always implied that he might write something and he was a bit of a bastard in his youth and his children loved him and idolized him and respected him and when I was young he was a helluva outdoorsman and watched out for us and he was crabby sometimes and he could be grumpy and always hugged us goodnight and people could tell that he genuinely cared and he was a character and probably he was fun to have a drink with and he appreciated books and piano and the Liberals and loved the north and Canada and worked with Aboriginals and told some hilarious stories.

I remember his story about picking up these two Americans in a river boat somewhere in the far far north. The Yanks were so afraid of the water and boats in general that it took him fifteen minutes to talk them into the boat, get them settled in and calmed down before he could get back on the river. The whole trip they kept asking him to slow down, so he kept turning up the gas, just for shits and giggles and scaring them and they were pretty much petrified, so when he got near the end of the river, coming up to the landing, he thought he'd have some fun and he cranked the boat open to full throttle and he was coming in at the dock and the Yanks were freaking out, and they would have jumped ship except it was solid rocks on both sides of the boat and he was chuckling and when he got close enough to shut it down, he reefed on the throttle and stopped laughing when the fucking thing broke off in his hand and he had about enough time to say oh shit before driving that river boat straight up the bank and into the trees. Needless to say, the yanks never got back in the boat.

Lot of those stories sound like bullshit now, but I know for a fact that he used to waterski in a sweater. Instead of starting in the water, he'd sit on the dock with a cigarette in his mouth in the early morning with his sweater on and let the boat driver throw him the rope and when he had it good in his hand, they'd get some speed up and pop him off the dock and he'd ride around on them glassy northern lakes like some kind of woolen king of the rising sun.

One would like to think that's how it felt when he went. Probably wasn't, but what the fuck. What's a little lie to one's self in a time like this.

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