Thursday, April 19, 2007

BTW South Song of the Day
Lederhosen Lucil, "Doin' the Ganglion" from Tales From the Pantry (T.L.A.M.)

Commentary: Sweet fancy Moses, there is no more fitting an opening act for The Aquabats! than Lederhosen Lucil, the wacky, whimsical German alter ego of a slender wisp of a girl from Montreal named Krista Muir. I am a card-carrying Aqua-Cadet; my Cadet codename is Captain Thumbs-Up. I've had the privilige of seeing The Aquabats! live on stage on at least four separate occasions. I've seen the wild live show of They Might Be Giants when an entire auditorium of people enthusiastically chanted "Apes! Apes! Apes!" for minutes on end. I've seen the band Snmnmnm, who use a tuba in place of a bass guitar. All this and more I've seen with my own two eyes, but, without question, Lederhosen Lucil was the most gloriously bizarre thing I've ever seen and heard on stage: a tiny girl in lederhosen and a pigtailed blond wig standing behind an enormous Yamaha electronic organ and singing with a voice that ranged three octives. And the lyrics were spiced with just enough German to confuse the hell out of the audience. Jumpin' Jack Pratt, it was ludicrous and grand beyond imagining!

Caution: Vulgarity ahead.


Mission: Unpossible Zwei - Tag Sieben
Matthew 18:9, "And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire." The Bible that rests on my bookshelf is The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, bought when I took Professor Ralph Williams's (!) Bible class back in Ann Arbor. As a kid, I'd had The Children's Bible (long on watercolors, short on Scripture), but, not counting a clutch of miniature New Testaments from the Gideons, I didn't personally own a real Bible until college when on a lark I bought myself a King James. I gave that to the Mountain when scholarship compelled me to buy The New Oxford. I like owning a scholarly Bible, it makes me feel as if I'm striking a blow against the blight of the literalist, Creationist Evangelicals and Left Behind addicts. (Hey, dumb-dumbs, this "Rapture" of yours? It's nonsensical heresy. You know that, right?) And it reminds me that Christianity has a long and glorious tradition of learning and critical thinking that long predates the narrow-minded Bible-thumpers and Jesus freaks.

But that's not the point. Getting back to the Gospel According of Matthew: so, you see, the desire to hold a girl in my arms, to delight in her warmth and touch her naughty bits (or, lacking the girl, to masturbate to the thought of same) isn't my fault, the blame lies with my lousy, turncoat eyes.

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