Is it red?

It uses batteries.

At the airport this morning, the clue-free people inspecting my bag of electronics spotted a couple of yogurt containers, and informed me that I couldn’t bring them on my flight to San Francisco. They changed their minds when I pointed out that the plastic cups were full of black beans, not yogurt.

Idiots!

I’ve never known yogurt to cause any problems, but the combination of black beans and a spark in a jet ten kilometers above the earth could be disastrous. I probably shouldn’t even mention that; beans will likely be the next item banned from commercial flights.

I mentioned this proposal to Alicia, who opined, “He’s one ignorant fucktard.” Alicia went on to provide a semantic argument for her harsh judgment.

“So what about French poodles, Russian hounds, and those damned little Chew-wah-wahs?” she demanded.

I agreed, and cited the comic Carlos Mencia. Mencia said he had trouble coming up with an inoffensive description for immigrants from south of the United [sic] States. Hispanic? No, a concoction of the Nixon administration. Chicano? Negatory, “I’m from El Salvador, and Chicano means Mexican.” Latino? Nein! “I don’t speak Latin; I speak Spanish!”

And so it was that Mencia concluded that the least-offensive slang for the demographic in question was, “beaner.”

And so it is that, even though “mongrels who defecate prolifically” is clearly preferable to, “canine Americans,” I suggest staying with the one-syllable name that’s worked well for centuries, “dog.”

Arf!

It turns out that Helena’s mother Mabel had spent a bit of time looking at my Internet site, and had a tart critique she served with desert.

“You seem like a smart enough boy,” Mabel said after the conversation turned to art, “but you piss away your talents like they were pancakes at a goddamned Baptist picnic. It’s time for my nap, but I truly hope you finally do some honest work when you get home.”

And that’s more or less how the visit ended.

I thanked Mabel for her excellent advice, and soon left with Helena, who suggested, “looks like time to find a liquor store.”

We proceeded to waste a large volume of conceptual pancakes, so to speak.

Goddamned Baptists!

?!!!

Were the testicles still attached to the beaver? If so, did the beaver resist or cooperate? Or, may Heaven fofend, was the poor beaver killed for his therapeutic genitalia?

With so little information and so many questions, I headed for the Internet, where I found a reference that was anything but enlightening.

Jacques de Vitry (twelfth-thirteenth centuries) describes the beaver, which “bites off its own testicles with its teeth and throws them to the pursuing hunters” who make use of them for medicinal purposes.

One just has to love anything done by a good writer who kills himself at thirty-one in 1969, no? I enjoyed Toole’s four-hundred pages of writing; that suggests I should read another book in its entirety. And I will, but probably not until my computer breaks again.