Houseless

HOUSELESS, adj. Having paid all taxes on household goods.

2008 Update:  Lacking a gathering place for heirs or a shelter from envy.

For every evil, there's a cure

For gluttony, drink in place of food

For Envy there's allure

For Sloth there's the reflective mood 

For Lust, there's speech

For Wrath, a blow against the head

For Greed, there's reach

And for Pride, there is the dead.

Which is my way of wishing a happy birthday to the mouldering corpse of Ambrose Bierce.

Special Ghost Wednesday

This week, please welcome my guest, Ambrose Bierce, this being the hallowe'en season according to the drugstore in my neighborhood. Monsieur Bierce was asked to demonstrate fables.

The Opossum of The Future
ONE day an Opossum who had gone to sleep hanging from the highest branch of a tree by the tail, awoke and saw a large Snake wound about the limb, between him and the trunk of the tree.

"If I hold on," he said to himself, "I shall be swallowed; if I let go I shall break my neck."

But suddenly he bethought himself to dissemble.

"My perfected friend," he said, "my parental instinct recognises in you a noble evidence and illustration of the theory of development. You are the Opossum of the Future, the ultimate Fittest Survivor of our species, the ripe result of progressive prehensility - all tail!"

But the Snake, proud of his ancient eminence in Scriptural history, was strictly orthodox, and did not accept the scientific view.

The Cat and The King
A CAT was looking at a King, as permitted by the proverb.

"Well," said the monarch, observing her inspection of the royal person, "how do you like me?"

"I can imagine a King," said the Cat, "whom I should like better."

"For example?"

"The King of the Mice."

The sovereign was so pleased with the wit of the reply that he gave her permission to scratch his Prime Minister's eyes out.

The Wolf Who Would Be A Lion
A FOOLISH Fellow who had been told that he was a great man believed it, and got himself appointed a Commissioner to the Interasylum Exposition of Preserved Idiots. At the first meeting of the Board he was mistaken for one of the exhibits, and the janitor was ordered to remove him to his appropriate glass case.

"Alas!" he exclaimed as he was carried out, "why was I not content to remain where the cut of my forehead is so common as to be known as the Pacific Slope?"

The Blotted Esctcheon And The Soiled Ermine

A BLOTTED Escutcheon, rising to a question of privilege, said:

"Mr. Speaker, I wish to hurl back an allegation and explain that the spots upon me are the natural markings of one who is a direct descendant of the sun and a spotted fawn. They come of no accident of character, but inhere in the divine order and constitution of things."

When the Blotted Escutcheon had resumed his seat a Soiled Ermine rose and said:

"Mr. Speaker, I have heard with profound attention and entire approval the explanation of the honourable member, and wish to offer a few remarks on my own behalf. I, too, have been foully calumniated by our ancient enemy, the Infamous Falsehood, and I wish to point out that I am made of the fur of the MUSTELA MACULATA, which is dirty from birth."

About Ambrose Bierce: Um, well, duh. Along with his famous Devil's Dictionary, and invective, Bierce was also a fabulous fabulist. On occassional Wednesday when the times and the morals call for it or I've otherwise forgotten to ask someone to guest here, some of the fables may appear here on Wednesdays. More can be found using the link on the right, last under "Ambrose Bierce Resources."

How to be a guest on this site: There are two options: One is to be a writer famous for invective, die and ferment for ninety years. The other is to email me at dpascover at mac dot com. On a future Wednesday, I'll email you with a word to define and ask you to return a satirical definition and at least one graphic representing you and or your definition by the following Saturday. The rules are: No profanity, no novels and whatever I make up at the last minute.

Endear

ENDEAR, v.t. To procure for yourself, or bestow upon another, the ability to do a favor.

The friendship of Crocker I tenderly prize-
I wear many kinds of his collars.
He's endeared to my heart by the sacred ties
Of a thousand accessible dollars.*
- Rare Ben. Truman

2006 Update: To marinate.

*Note: Crocker was a railroad baron in California who once offered to pay Bierce if he would stop writing columns about $73 million in unpaid taxes that Crocker owed. Bierce responded publicly, offering to accept a bribe of $73 million and suggesting if he weren't at home, Crocker could just leave the check with Bierce's dear friend, the Secretary of the United States Treasury. Such practice is archaic, as contemporary journalistic ethics now require discrete billing.

The Old Gringo

Story #50, In which Ambrose Bierce reaches his destination.

To hear the story, talk to the skull.



To read the story, blow out the candle.


Happy 164th birthday to Ambrose Bierce.

To celebrate, here are two new Bierce-related links:

Did you all know Bierce wrote fables? I didn't until Indie mentioned it sometime back. Here's a Collection.
and, The Devil's Dictionary Defiled, by S.R. Brubaker. Brubaker's site is a well-designed and funny page including definitions by Bierce and Brubaker.


This week in The Prattler, Unheard Of, the challenge to the Voting Rights Act.

Waking Ambrose

Story #38, how it all began.


To hear the story, say howdy to Doug







To read the story, salute Señor Bierce.

HEADLINE: IDENTITY CRISIS DEEPENS
Santa Clarita, California April 1, 2006
A lonely blogger in this dusty desert hamlet of 150,000 souls added a weekly column to Prattle, to be written on contemporary issues in an imitation of Ambrose Bierce's sinister style. Doug Pascover has spent the last of the best years of his life imitating Bierce's lexicography but reports feelings of guilt and inadequacy after reading on the website of The Ambrose Bierce Appreciation Society that he had revived Bierce's column, Prattle, when he knew he had only plagiarized the title. The introductory column can be found on Prattle on the page listed as "The Prattler." Future columns are intended to appear on Saturday, the day The Wasp, the weekly for which Bierce's column appeared in the 1880s and 90s was published. Mr. Pascover's dogs, Willie and Walela ask that you pray for his self-recollection.

Freethinker

Happy 163th Birthday to Ambrose Bierce. You haven't aged a day in 90 years. A skeptic then, I wish you could get a load of now.



Freethinker, n. A miscreant who wickedly refuses to look out of a Priest's eyes and persists in looking into them with too searching a glance. Freethinkers were formerly shot, burned, boiled, racked, flogged, cropped, drowned, hanged, disemboweled, impaled, beheaded, skinned.

With the lapse of time our holy religion has fallen into the hands of merciful and humane expounders, and the poor Freethinker's punishment is entrusted to Him who said, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay." Here on earth the misguided culprit is only threatened, pursued, reviled, avoided, silenced, cursed, insulted, robbed, cheated, harassed, derided, slandered.

2005 Update: A maverick who, having navigated an unmarked path by constellations they name themselves, driven forward by independent will and fierce curiousity, comes finally to the party line. A Valedictorian reading "The Road Less Traveled" to the assembly.

Lucinda, thanks for the alert.

Tom, thanks for the help baking.

Don Swaim at The Ambrose Bierce Site made yellow cake.

Lexicographer

Lexicographer, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to be considered "as one having authority," whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statue. Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as "obsolete" or "obsolescent" and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor -- whereby the process of improverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that "it isn't in the dictionary" -- although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own meaning and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were possible, and the language now rapidly perishing at one end and slowly renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy preservation -- sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion -- the lexicographer was a person unknown, the dictionary a creation which his Creator had not created him to create.

God said: "Let Spirit perish into Form,"
And lexicographers arose, a swarm!
Thought fled and left her clothing, which they took,
And catalogued each garment in a book.
Now, from her leafy covert when she cries:
"Give me my clothes and I'll return," they rise
And scan the list, and say without compassion:
"Excuse us -- they are mostly out of fashion."
-----Sigismund Smith

2005 Update: Someone to whom words are a sentence.


Lexicographer, Ambrose Bierce