January 31, 2004
Daily News?

A New York Times Op-Ed piece on the American misunderstanding of the Middle East.

The Times of India explains the BBC's indignance over being hammered for the Kelly's suicide, while Blair and the government get off scot-free.

An Edmonton Journal op-ed piece on the Bushin30seconds.org site, with some of the greatest commercials you'll never see on Superbowl sunday.

Look at these fucking headlines. Is it always like this? Is this the Sixties? Is this the Nixon era? Is this the time of the Reagan administration? Why hasn't the invading, the bombing, the misuse of power stopped? Why haven't our headlines evolved over the years, and will the news read any different in ten years? Twenty?

Humanity simply continues to make the same mistakes that every generation of humans has made before, and the current empire is repeating the follies of every empire before it. Question is: Will there ever be a turning point?

January 30, 2004
Respect, Jamie

A Canadian soldier was recently killed in action by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan. It was a sad moment for us. He was the first Canadian soldier, I believe, to be killed in combat since the Korean war. Except for the four soldiers that were killed by Americans last year.

What struck me about the story was the national reaction. Not only did the leader of our country, Paul Martin, show up when the casket touched Canadian soil, he showed up with the Defense Minister and a high ranking general.

And, it appears that Canadian press is allowed to take photographs of the casket. For those familiar with current American policies, you will know that the current American president does attend soldier's funerals and does not allow the media to photograph returning caskets.

I'm glad we do.

Because nothing is as fucking real as the understanding that the box those eight pallbearers are carrying is filled with what used to be Cpl. Jamie Murphy. And that's what's been missing in America since Bush invaded Iraq on false premises - reality.

That's right. America is falling apart, the president is trying to run revisionist history as we speak, when it is so apparent that Iraq was a war built on lies, and that few Americans are ready to deal with the real complexities of the world, or believe that people like the Europeans aren't a bunch of pussies, and might have some wisdom to offer on the whole situations.

And part of it is because the war has been sanitized for them. It is important to point this out, to look at the dead and weigh the loss, and to pay respect.

It's fucking cold, all over the country.

January 29, 2004
Koboku Haiku Sephirot

Due to the overwhelming response to my fascination with hippos and their brute power, I have decided to modify last week's new mandate.

From now on, the Daily Mingus will celebrate daily events only in haiku, and specifically, with hippo-based haiku, and more specifically, in the haiku sephirot format. Interpretations may be added by the author, but do not necessarily need to be read by the reader. I highly suggest forming your own opinion of the koboku (Swahili for hippo) haiku sephirot before reading the interpretations. Thank you. - The Mgmt.

Hippo I

graceful and silent
the sunken beast emerges
moonlight on the Nile

Hippo II

grazing on shortgrass
mother and calf - nubile lips
kiss the dewy earth

Hippo III

the young male's challenge
answered by a dark master's
unmatched violence


Hippo IV

sweating blood
the intruder submerges
ripple before death


Interpretations of the Moments:

Hippo I: Chloe gets out of the tub after Mingus tears her a loving new one.
Hippo II: Chloe eats ice cream, while talking on the phone with her mother.
Hippo III: Chloe returns to tub, phone rings. The accountant is calling.
Hippo IV: Mingus threatens dismemberment. Hangs up.

January 28, 2004
Wrath of the Hippo

Bush lied, God died. Now, relating to a completely different obsession of mine...

There is a grave injustice in this world. People fear the shark, they fear the lion, and the fear the bear, but the do not fear the hippo. Yet the hippo, for all its soft branding and seemingly docile portrayal in nature photos, is an extremely violent animal, probably the most dangerous on the planet.

Consider this:

More than 200 people in Africa are killed by hippos every year—more than by all other wild animals combined.

Hippos weigh between 3000-4500 kg (6600 - 9900 pounds). A hippo can run 30 km/h on land. And yes, hippos make their way to land at night, when they graze.

Hippos have four teeth, which aren't all that sharp, but they are between 30 - 50 cm in length(over a foot long). The jaws are extremely powerful. A hippo bite will leave a foot-deep, fist-sized hole in whatever it chomps on.

And the hippos themselves - evolutionarily hard-wired to be paranoid, aggressive, and unafraid to attack anything that comes between them and their calf, or enters their territory. Hippos regularly chase boats that come into their personal space. Imagine the fear of watching an 8000 pound land animal bursting out of the water with enough power to actually porpoise behind the boat as it swims.

So why is it that we North Americans don't fear the hippo, the most fearsome beast of them all? Is it because we can't admit to being afraid of something that looks like a big pink wet teddy bear? Because it's a herbivore? Because Spielberg picked on the wrong animal back in 1975?

Or, is it because Hippos tear two-hundred people limb from limb every year, but we don't give a shit because they ain't tearing North Americans apart - they're tearing Africans apart, and sadly, we don't generally blink when the Hutus & Tutsis slaughter a million people, and we don't much want to think about what's going on in the Congo, and how many people (minimum 1.7 million) were wiped out there in the civil war, because hey, it's Africa.

It's the truth. No North American is ever going to wander out into the night to take a piss and panic a grazing hippo who suddenly opens wide the jaws of death and slams them tight and leaves a fist-sized hole where your heart and lungs once were. But that shouldn't matter at all, cause killing power is killing power, and unfettered mammalian rage of this size should be given the credit, and yay, the fear it deserves, and our disinterest in the deaths of people far away from here should not detract from the fact that the hippo would hammerfuck every other animal on the planet in straight-up death-match competition.

The mighty hippo. That's right. Now I wanna hear some motherfucking respect.

January 27, 2004
The Hundred Dollar Piss

To illustrate the sort of night Friday was, I would like to present the best idea I heard during the entire evening: a new reality tv show / test of strength entitled 'The Hundred Dollar Piss'.

Ten men sit around a table in a bar they do not usually frequent. The bar should have several bikers and millworkers, most of them with complete mullets. The show, shot with subtle hidden cameras, begins as each of the contestants place a hundred dollar bill on the table. The waitress comes by to collect it, and replaces each bill with a glass of beer. She will refill the beer every twenty minutes, on the minute.

The rules are simple.

Number One. Drink one beer every twenty minutes. If a contestant cannot finish the alotted beer in the allotted time, he or she is disqualified.

Number Two. No one can leave the table.

If a man has to piss, shit, vomit or bleed from the eyes, he cannot leave the table. If he does, he is disqualified immediately. Which quickly brings us to the inevitable test of strength.

Who among us has the balls to piss themselves in public for a thousand dollars?

Myself, I can drink upwards of nine beer without needing to piss, but I couldn't last more than two hours at that pace. Within a couple of hours of solid drinking, I would either need to piss in my seat surrounded by bikers, or I would have to stand up, much to my manly shame, walk to the bathroom, and take a hundred dollar piss.

The winner, obviously, is the last man sitting, the last man able to drink the beer that comes, relentlessly, like the burgeoning tide, every twenty minutes. He does not need to be able to stand, to speak, or even to open his eyes, but he must drink that beer, without assistance. And when he finishes that final golden calf, he can be carried off on the shoulders of the vanquished, with a thousand dollars in his pocket.

I don't think I need to explain the inherent possible drama in this scenario: unlimited draught, hidden cameras, cardiac arrest, drinking one's self into complete and utter oblivion while covered in piss, all the while risking the beating of a lifetime by playing scorched earth with a beer-hall famous for supporting the Hell's Angels.

This has prime-time Canadian gold written all over it. The Hundred Dollar Piss. Coming soon to a digital channel near you.

January 26, 2004
According to Tourette

Overwhelmed by the innated stupidity displayed by the ruling class in America, what with the admission of lies by Kay and Powell, we have a special presentation. I mean, I could go on about this weekend's festivities and how drunk I got, proving my own self-destructive nature, but these things are so much better demonstrated in story. Maybe tomorrow I'll tell the tale of drunken Scotsmen, Rendrag's near-conversion to Buddhism, pool cue brawls, and the new reality show, The Hundred Dollar Piss. Or maybe I'll save it for a rainy day.

In the meantime, I once again make a ramrod-headed point about religion that no one who goes to church will appreciate, in a little story I like to call:


Genesis Redux
by Mingus Tourette

Monkeys are superior to men in this: when a monkey looks onto a mirror, he see a monkey.        
--Malcolm de Chazal

Once upon a time, there was a monkey. On the line, he had a couple of monkey bitches. And he fucked the living hell out of them on a regular basis, and lo and behold, they begat him some serious lineage. Serious.

Monkey grew up, got old, pecker got soft and he couldn't fuck no more and the sons took that over, and he died. The rest of the monkeys, including his sons, ate his body and dumped it over the branches, where it fell to the ground and was eventually eaten by birds and rodents and insects and unseen forces. The son monkeys were respectful of his memory and did not fuck the mothers, mostly because they were too old.

The sons of monkeys grew up some as well, and found some new bitches, mostly their sisters and cousins, and fucked the living hell out of them as well. Those bitches begat them some lineage, whereby they had some junior monkeys, which they raised to avoid pythons and jaguars and the junior monkeys grew up to be strong and quick. The sons of the first monkey eventually grew old and frail. Many fell to the jaguars and the pythons they had trained their sons to avoid. Some simply died of failing hearts and arthritic hips and embarrassment over their patchy complexion. In any case, their sons ate their bodies and let their skeletons slide from the trees to the ground.

And those junior monkeys had sons and got old and died and their sons kept on fucking bitches and getting eaten by jaguars and passing on the knowledge of which roots to pick and which snakes to really avoid. They all did pretty well. This happened a thousand times. And then a thousand more. And the monkeys learned more and got taller and started to speak.

And one day, a great grandson of that first monkey woke up, stared at the burgeoning sky and spoke aloud to himself. He said, 'I know that my father and my mother made me, and that their mothers and fathers before them made them, but what made the first monkey? What made the first monkey?' And he looked up at the sky and said, oh great morning sky, did you make the first monkey? And nothing happened. But then the sun rose, as it did every day.

And that monkey thought, maybe, just maybe, we fell out of the sky. Out of the sun. And he ran down to tell his brother, who promptly told him to push off, because he was making more little monkeys. But this sun watching monkey, he was struck by this question. Where did the monkeys come from? And so he asked the elders, who said that they came from their ancestors. The ancestors came from the forest across the sea, and that was all there was. There was one great ancestor who became a monkey and he made all the monkeys from then on.

But that wasn't good enough for the sun watching monkey.

It must be understood that on that day, the sun watching monkey had looked at the sky and had also asked himself what happened to monkeys when they died and were eaten. The common elder answer was that they went into the bellies of the other monkeys and were appreciated for giving them life.

But what happened to their questions, asked the sun watching monkey? They are eaten, said the elders. They dissolve in our bellies, as we will dissolve in the bellies of our children. And for some reason, this scared the sun watching monkey.

It can't be so, he said. Our questions must go somewhere, not just into the bellies of our friends.

To which the elders replied, no, they go to the bellies, and that is all.

And the monkey was afraid. He did not want his questions to go to the bellies, because he thought that if unanswered, those questions would rot in the guts of the monkey that ate him. And mostly, they would be lost. They would be lost and they would rot and rot and infect the other monkeys. So he said to himself, no, the questions must live on. The must go back to the place where we came from.

They must come from the sun.

And it was that simple, to look up at the sun and think that maybe his questions would go back there when he was in the bellies of his sons, and it gave him a feeling that was like the springtime just before the fruit was plentiful. It would feel like hope, and it was good.

Thus was God born.



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