What The Inauguration Taught Us.

The author of this august journal has nothing more to offer on the Trump debacle. Indeed, he, for it is a he, is as tired of it as you probably are. Perhaps we have already gone too far when the press conjugate on the possibility of a Secret Service agent having prosthetic hands to better grasp whatever weaponry is harboured in his trousers.
No more
We are going to build a great wall. Yes, we are. I build tremendous walls. It’ll be great.
However, Fryday is close to the Trump Camp, through no fault of its own, and it is our understanding that there is soon to be revealed a body of correspondence between the 45th President of the United States and God. It appears that He, God, has much to learn about The Art of the Deal.
But, that is for the future and Fryday has no control over that. What it does control, however, is the present and the recent past. And the recent past, the inauguration, has presented us with one photo that Fryday feels to be more poignant, more telling, than the millions of others that captured the nadir of reality television. This one photograph must seer our minds and forever brand our history.
Look upon it and weep.
Weep upon what the world has lost and what awaits.

There is class and there is not.

A Vainglorious Time

Tomorrow the United States inaugurates its 45th President.
I am lost for words.
So, I am turning this Fryday over to two eminent brothers who were never lost for a word and indeed were made of and for words.
They are George and Charles Merriam who in 1843 founded G&C Merriam Co. which, after the brothers bought A Compendius Dictionary of the English Language from the estate of Noah Webster, would publish the much lauded and venerable Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The first publication was in 1845.
I turned to their dictionary for two reasons. First, its American origins and, second, I wanted the exact definition of one of my favourite words—a word I despaired of ever having an opportunity or a reason to use.
Until now.
Until the 45th President of the United States.
The word is vainglorious.
According to the Webster brothers, it means, boastful.
Exactly.
Now, there may be Fryday readers of a certain persuasion who do not think vainglorious a fair or accurate description of the 45th President. Maybe even that it is disrespectful. I respect that view. However, for the rest of us here is a little game inspired by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The Dictionary gives us a long list of synonyms and words related to vainglorious. I have replicated the list below. The game is for you to tick off how many you think aptly and accurately describe the incoming President. If you are feeling particularly studious, you might even send me a number.
Happy hunting.

assured, biggety (or biggity), bigheaded, complacent, consequential, egoistic (also egoistical), egotistic (or egotistical), important, overweening, pompous, prideful, proud, self-conceited, self-important, self-opinionated, self-satisfied, smug, stuck-up, swellheaded, vain, conceited, blusterous, blustery, boastful, bombastic, braggart, bragging, braggy, cocky, swaggering; arrogant, assumptive, bumptious, cavalier, chesty, disdainful, fastuous, haughty, high-and-mighty, high-hat, huffy, lofty, lordly, masterful, peremptory, pontifical, self-asserting, self-assertive, snobbish, snobby, snooty, supercilious, superior, toplofty (also toploftical), uppish, uppity; domineering, high-handed, imperious; highfalutin (also hifalutin), holier-than-thou, pretentious; overconfident, presuming, presumptuous; confident, self-assured, self-confident; self-adulatory, self-congratulatory, self-contented, self-gratulatory; self-applauding, self-dramatizing, self-glorifying, self-promoting; self-affected, self-centered, self-engrossed, selfish; condescending, patronizing.

Dear God: The Trump Years i

23 December 2016

Prairie Chapel Ranch
Crawford
Texas
U.S.A.

G,

How long has it been since we chewed the fat? Too long, I reckoning. But this is how it is God—I have been busy. You know how it is, it is one thing to find God but sometimes you have to go away, count the stock and not let Him find you. So I let things settle for a while. Let you do your thing and kept my suggestions and advice to myself. Not that I think you did much wrong in that time. In fact in the beginning Laura and I reckoned you did real well in fact. Bit too much rope there for President Obama maybe but hey look at the shoes he had to fill!!! So you kept him on a loose lasso. Nothing wrong with that. But you kinda came unstuck there at the end didn’t you? Now I am not telling you how to do your job God, but you have to understand what politics is about in the United States and clearly you don’t have a fat buffalos turd of an idea of what goes on in our neck of the woods. You see, I don’t know how you run things up there, but this is how it is done down here. Think of it as a ranch. We only profit if we got good breeding stock. Big peckers. That’s what we look for in a President. You could look no further than Daddy and me for examples. We had the peckers. We had the breeding. Prime stock. And if you hadn’t got it wrong we would have had another Bush, Brother Jeb, in the White House. But, no you had to somehow persuade Donald Trump to throw his Stetson into the ring. What was you thinking? The man has got no class. He is rattier than gopher on heat. He ain't fit to walk in the footsteps of great Presidents like myself. And it is not me that is saying that, it is all my friends. They both agree that the world had gone downhill since my presidency and now we have reached the bottom of the gulch. You know that story you wrote up in the old testament about the burning of the bush? Well, that just the sure as heck is what you just done. You have burnt up my legacy. All the good things I did for the greatest country in the world, you are about to turn to bbq fodder. The Father, the Son and the Holy Toast! Now, I am not bitching at ya here. Laura reminds me of the old saying That God Moves in Mysterious Ways. And I can understand that you have your reasons for some of the things you done, tho you haven’t yet explained to me the Kardashians. But Donald Trump????? There was a time when you would have run that past me first. I guess we are not talking much these days. Maybe I will write to you again. I don’t know. All I can say is that right now, at this point of time, God, I am disappointed in you.

One day at a time,
GWB (President).
 

Dancing in the Shadows

Like most people of my generation, I spent my early teen years loving The Beatles. Like many, I also embraced the grittier Rolling Stones. Like some, I discovered and identified with Bob Dylan, but that was later in my teens and only after Dylan was electrified and backed by a remarkable band called—well—The Band.
The Band comprised a group of five highly accomplished musicians, four of them Canadian and one from Arkansas. They are mostly known these days for the songs of their lead writer and guitarist, Robbie Robertson—among them: The Weight, The Night They Drove of Dixie Down and Up on Cripple Creek. Theirs was a fusion of rock ‘n roll and roots. Nobody did it better then or have been eclipsed since. Sadly, all but two of the group—Robertson and keyboardist Garth Hudson—are dead now. Dylan lives on—kind of.
Hudson toured New Zealand recently, along with The Band’s producer John Simon. I attended the Auckland concert, promoted as the 40th celebration of The Band’s legendary last concert (with Robertson) The Last Waltz. The Aotea Centre wasn’t full, a last minute change from the original and smaller Civic saw to that. But, there were enough Band devotees there to provide the atmosphere and they were articulate, wise, and expectant.
You see, none of us were there for the music. We had heard it all, many times. All of us had watched The Last Waltz so often we knew every nuance (yes, Clapton did break his guitar strap and, yes, that is cocaine up Neil Young’s nose) and every lyric line. No matter how accomplished the (mainly) New Zealand musicians were, and they were, we were not there for the music. We were there for the man. We were there to see Hudson. To be simply in the same room.
Hudson did perform, beautifully and brilliantly. But in the end that was a bonus. If Hudson had simply shuffled onto the stage, it would likely have been enough. It was enough for him—for us—to be there. It would not happen again. Soon, sadly, there will be of the original Band only Robertson.  And that is little more than a sad sour, slightly bitter, aftertaste.
Bill English is not that. Bill English will do well. I doubt he will be great. He has greatness thrust upon him, but it is not a mantle that fits and will soon be consigned to a plastic dry-cleaning bag in a back wardrobe. Instead, Bill English will do his best in his quiet, mannered manner. He knows he will live in the perpetual shadow of his predecessor, and he knows there is little he can do about that. It is enough, I think he thinks, to be given a second chance, and this time against a comparatively weak opposition. He will take that chance.
English will never be another John Key. He accepts that. We should too. There will also never be another Band. We Band fans know that too.  John Key left us with Bill English. The Band left us with Ronnie Robertson. We now dance among the shadows where there was once so much light…so much light.

Is Necrophillia Dead in the Water?

The publication of Fifty Shades of Grey in 2011 confirmed for many what they had long surmised—that sex can be interesting and not necessarily repetitive, let alone solely reproductive. Nevertheless, for many of the women (and some men) then sitting in cattle class surreptitiously soaking up the BDSM adventures of Anastasia Steele it was a guilty and vicarious pleasure. They couldn’t see themselves doing it: all that whipping and tying up, whilst interesting, was best left in the world of fantasy—or at most minor spanking when Bill got home from work. Yet in the high rise apartments of Auckland, the parliamentary offices of Wellington and the boredom of Hamilton, BDSM is practiced and perfected far more often than we may think. For many, it has replaced vanilla sex as the norm, the benchmark. It is in such quarters not seen as obscene or perverse, an abomination or a cause of earthquakes. It is just what it is. Providing it is consensual, it is a pleasure, an adventure, an interest. There is no evidence, like the myth that soft drugs lead to hard drugs, that BDSM leads to greater extremities of behaviour like necrophilia or child sex, both of which can be described as, and are, perversions. Indeed it could be said that a dalliance in BDSM sates the appetite for anything more, and it may well be our most potent sexual safety valve. However, it appears that “Bishop” Tamaki disagrees with this assessment. God has told him, he says, that deviant behaviour—particularly but not solely homosexuality—is the cause of the earthquakes our country has suffered. If we are to believe Mr Tamaki, God is perhaps moving with the times: a plague of locusts or a rain of frogs visited upon our house is so old hat. Mr Tamaki is entitled to his opinion, I doubt it is God’s, but I think I know where true obscenity and perversion rests.

As Cecil C. Sackrider Sees it: Trump is God's Gift

As Cecil C. Sackrider sees it, brethren, in Donald Trump God has visited upon us His greatest gift since Genesis: the gift of fear, the gift of revelation, the gift of jubilation, the gift of celebration, the gift of God’s eternal love. Donald Trump is all these and more. For, in him, God has gifted us the spectacle of the Last Judgement, The Blood Moon Prophecy, Armageddon, the End of the World, The Rapture. These were my thoughts, my prayers, as Billy-Jo and I lay in bed last evening, after her nightly anointing, watching the televised debate between Mr Trump and Mrs Clinton. I saw it right there in the full righteous splendour of the 80-inch screen kindly provided by Brother Nathan, of Nathan’s Appliances (1145 South 26^th). I saw God at His most majestic and beneficent best—showing unbelievers the glimpse of the hell that is their inevitable destination if they do not return to the righteous path to God. And so I say unto you, brethren, do not look upon the debate as an equitable contest of two persons locked in a gladiatorial duel. Rather, look upon it, look upon the dark visage of Donald Trump rather than that of the wronged woman, and see upon it what Satan will unleash upon all those who spurn the love of the one true God. For know this, Donald Trump is God’s gift and Satan’s spawn. America be fearful. Be loved. Be afraid. And thus I did say to Billy-Jo. Billy-Jo looked upon me in justly such fear. “Is this true, Father-Husband? Is this the man to bring us to the end of our world? The end of our love? And she did shed upon me tears in a manner and in an innocence that did bring a stirring to my soul and to my body. “Perhaps to the world as we know it, my dear child. Unbelievers are destined to scream and fry in the infernal eternal flames of Hell,” I said…lovingly. “But not our love. Our love, will never end, my love.” And so it was that Billy-Jo, in her fear and in her awe and in her love, snuggled into me tightly. And thus, with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton looking upon us, I, for the second time last night, filled the young body of my dear dear wife with Holly Spirit.

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