Ok, some newly-minted MBA on the top floor, Mike, just decided to create us an Office of Public Relations. As if we need one. I mean, we sell innovative pest-control devices, mostly for the poultry industry. PR??
Plus, he only interviewed one candidate, Patti Ritlyn, whose overflowing ‘hotness’ gives me at least the impression the he forgot ‘PUBLIC’ has an ‘L’ in it.
Anyway, she’s got a spiffy office, (vacated un-willingly by Lionel in Acct’s Receivable).His new quarters make a broom closet look spacious, and his usually agressive, (ok, ‘ferocious’) moods are now pretty much terminally ballistic. All the better to yell at deadbeats though, I guess. But back to Patti.
Miss Patti, bless her heart, was like totally duh on ‘PR, whaas dat?’ She’s up there since Monday morning, dicking with Lionel’s computer and um… learning the ropes, so to speak. Anyway we just got this first office e-mail. It sounds like she may be pulling (pushing?) on the right rope, but I’ll let the reader decide. I wish her well; she is qualified. Anatomically at least. Oh wait, ‘PUBLIC RELATIONS’.

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 FROM: Patti Ritlyn in P-R
RE: Egyptian Goddess of Love?? (Don’t quote me on that, LOL)

Ok, Hi everybody. Is this thing working?
So like I’m in charge of P-R, and I want to explain some of the stuff you may be noticing, as I ease into position.
First of all, the trees. Mike said I could put them anywhere I wanted, so they’re there at the entrance beside the logo sign. A pair of pear trees. Don’t worry, Larry will level the ground tomorrow afternoon. He’s my brother-in-law (um.. my sister’s husband, relax guys) and he does landscaping a lot. Golf courses mainly. He can make a par four into a par 2 in half a day, he’s that good.
By the way, I’ll be off Friday. I’m going to a P-R convention, at the Grand Interconsonantal in Haifa Bay. It’ll help me in my new job, hopefully, you know,  peering at my peers there on the pier. Plus it’s only like 400 shekels per diem. Or per night. Something like that.
Ok, next we have Pyre to get over with. Icksa, it’s like when they burn dead bodies. Gross. Pyrotechnics are nice though. Mike, quote, “expects real fireworks from a bombshell like you.”, he told me. Don’t know if he’s allowed to say stuff like that. I do know that if I can help the man-on-the-street learn to love us and our rat-traps more fervently, it’ll be a success-story for us… and for  P-R. And we’re gonna have one hell of a Pyrrhic Victory Party.
But first I need to pore through the pile of Customer Complaints that keep pouring in since we released the Mongoose Im-mutilator II™. Poor me. Sounds like it works…well.. too well. Oh well, that’s my job.
In closing, it promises to be a pure pleasure, the challenge of making this company be more be-loved, of watching chicken farmers purr contentedly at night, knowing that our improved Fox-Gard-99™ is on duty.
Yes, it’s been a hectic week, growing into my new job. A week with a few little mis-steps. (‘Public Relations‘, turns out, is not ‘doing it in the road’. Google Schmoogle!)
But otherwise, this computer sure helps. (Thanks, Lionel, but what’s with all the gladiator bookmarks?)
Anyway, P-R is all about the vowels, I’m pretty sure. Put them together just right and life can be purr-fect.

Ta-ta for now/ Patti

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Wu: I smell an outside influence on Patti’s process of self-discovery…
JS: Just what are you insinuating, Wu?
Wu: Admit it; like some vile vole, you got to the young veal with your vial of vowels…
JS: That’s an awful way to put it. Ok, we had a little chit-chat. I might’ve told her to look for the power in P-R. But I didn’t write the letter.
Wu: C’mon. “A pair of Pear trees”?
JS: Her idea. Absolutely. That’s how I knew, ‘By George, she’s got it’. They’ll get plenty of water down there beside the failed pond at the Corporate entrance gate.
Wu: Right…
JS: Ok, I did it, Wu. I did it for Luke. Sue me.
Wu: Who’s the hell’s Luke?
JS: Um, Luke‘s the guy who likes to look at the leak in the lake. Unfortunately, he’s out of luck; he
lacks the key to the lock…
Wu: I give up!

I caught the sucker brown-handed.
11 AM, and the chickens suddenly started screaming…. how do you say it in Yiddish, ‘GEWALT!!’
It looked like a big ground-hog, familiar from Pennsylvania, except that it had a furry tail probably three feet long. Ok, two feet.
Called a ‘Nimia’ in Hebrew, I’d been warned.
The screen of the cage ends a couple inches below ground level, but these guys are known to dig tunnels, just like their cousin invasive species in Gaza.
‘I shall not go down as the chicken President who lost even one of his forces during my watch’.
Tonight I’ll sleep near the cage, if I don’t come up with a fool-proof defensive Iron Wall plan.
A moat of fire? I’m liking that idea…
Or possibly just an artificial lake surrounding their enclave, filled with, how to put it nicely, my own urine’?
Piss on mongooses.
Nature, snakes, mongeese, eggs, car inspection. It’s all so complicated.

This post is about cottage cheese, for anyone lactose-intolerant who wants to scroll-past.
Israel is all a-buzz these days, and not, as one might imagine, over the competing plans of our deluded neighbors as to how best to wipe us of the map.
 No, it’s all about the price of cottage cheese. The government recently took this precious concoction off the list of controlled-price substances. Which resulted in an immediate price rise from about 5 shekels for the little guy you see pictured below… to a whopping 8 shekels. Today I bought this one for, um, 7.24. As if we even have a
coin in circulation less than 10 ‘cents’. So I paid 7.30.
Anyway, the morning news was dedicated to the national discussion over importing god-forbid, cottage cheese from ‘outside’.Facebook has 30,000 ‘Friends’ blogging for a national boycott. We have the world-record cow/milk production, and a respectable dairy business here, with three companies basically determining the price to the consumer. They probably also sleep together most nights in a pile on the rug. It’s called monopolistic price-fixing. Big deal. Check ten airlines’ prices for the same flight destination and stand in awe how they all independently came up with $724.

Sooo.. what I want to know is, basically, the price of cheese in China, etc.
The item here, for comparison, weighs 250 grams. That’s a little over  half a pound, for anyone stuck outside the world metric system.
Oh, and 7.24 shekels is also a little over 2 bucks, at the current exchange rate. We can do the precise
math if I get some comparative prices here. Any size or currency will do. I just want to know what life
is like, cheese-wise, in the rest of the world.
Oh, and I pay about $9 a gallon for gas. Not that it adds much to a salad.
Any help will be appreciated/ JS

     I didn’t know quite what to wear for the event. Having hurriedly stitched together a chiffon-cum-Germanic ballet dress, I asked Wayne, the driver and a veteran on these outings “Is this impromptu tu-tu too Teutonic?”
He gave me a ‘heard it all before’ look, but luckily also a reassuring ‘only you could wear a thing like that’ and we were off.
   To the 3rd Annual Food Preservation and Preparation Dance-a-thon. In his old blue Chevy, (which had once been Robert’s Redford’. The guy has connections.)
We picked up Kenny Lionel, all pony-tailed and feathered out, plus his son Juan, looking a bit pale in the face for a Chocktaw. Too much ‘Final Reservation II’ in the basement rec-room, I figured, but didn’t mention it; my dress already riding up in the back uncomfortably.
“Nice tu-tu, Desmond.” Kenny joked as he fiddled with his head-dress in the side mirror.
Anyway, some band was already on stage when we pulled in, finishing up a rather bizarre composition. Juan feigned putting his fingers in his ears, but, when it was over, Kenny, busy unloading his jars and colanders from the trunk, opined:
“I don’t know, for me that Stacato Tocato in T minus 1, ‘in toto’  like totally rocks.”
“Yer full of shit.” Wayne told him, pretending to yank a feather out of his buddy’s hair. I maintained a discrete silence, blending in with the crowd as only a guy in a pink lace mini could manage.
We put the equipment on a folding Ball Mason’s Contestants table. A native American, Ken can can can-can candidates right off the Radio City stage in mid-dance. He’s that good. And there were substantial prizes in the Ball Mason Can-off, where he was expected to repeat last year’s first-place performance, when he thin-sliced and marianated a hip hip-hop hipster and sealed the guy for later use in one (1) five-quart jar.

‘Stews and Chews’ was a bit of a let-down this year, I was told. There were no typically top-shelf entries from Progresso®, so ‘so-so’ Soviet soups grabbed most of the categories. Them pesky Ruskies, they taking over, I swear.
 Kenny’s son tried in vain for like an hour to throw real-life darts at a non-virtual target with moving product icons flashing. Finally though, success! I smiled at Wayne when a wan Juan won one: a one-ton won-ton Load-O-Soup™ pallet. Supposed to last you all your life. I can see how that might happen.
 
     So it was dark, about 10:30 when we left. We discretely (?) eased out of our front-and-center seats halfway through the comedy programme. Dr. (?) James Kelvin somebody, a washed-up, freeze-dried, comb-over of an ex-refrigerator magnate doing an impersonation of a comedian, is about all I remember. Painful to sit through a stand-up so pitifully far from being an outstanding stand-out.  And with Camera-3 seemingly homed in on our famous three-some for Audience Reaction.
“Hi. I’m James. But when you get to know me, I’m Jim.” he started out. Then: “Just like Dames; when you get to know them they’re Dim. Take my wife for example. Please.”
I wasn’t buying. The drummer hit a a meagre rim-shot with the enthusiasm of a condemned man straightening his tie for a hanging. We waded though a bunch more misogynist flotsam; the geezer was truly ‘a farce to be reckoned with’, then did a tactical retreat, me pointing apologetically at my watch when I saw Cam-3′s red light come on.
    And we did have work to do. With Juan proudly pulling the tow-cart with his ton of soup through the gravel lot, we thought out our alternatives: We could hang out and try to sell most of the stuff off the tail-gate. Who knew how long that might take, maybe a lifetime? Or kinda abandon some of it on-site, a sign saying ‘Free Soup for the Soup-less’
Wayne had an idea: “Wait. I got a five ton jack in the trunk. If we sacrifice that, we can easily put a mere ton of soup in the old Chevy, no problem.”
I looked at Kenny. Kenny turned toward Juan, who to his credit did appear to smell a flaw in the
argument, but abstained, being low man on the totem-pole, despite his over-whelming soup-ownership…

So somewhere in Yazoo City there’s an abandoned exhibition grounds with a pallet of Won ton soup  in the far corner, there by the break in the fence by the gas station. Free. Pray it hasn’t rained before you get there, y’all.
Oh yeah, and a tattered pink tu-tu. Too Teutonic for the ride back to Hattiesburg. Cops, you know.

And I tell him: “Duh, because I didn’t order any. Um…because I know next-to bubkes from wine.”
“At your age?” he persists.
“Yeah, sad, ain’t it.” I tell him. “Enjoy your Doctor Pepper.”

Now actually I do know a couple factoids about wine. I suppose I ought to list them here, in case anyone is conceivably more in the dark than moi.
1) Wine comes in two colours, ok, one colour (red) plus what they call ‘white’, which isn’t, it’s clear. Milk is white. Wine-folks lie a lot. As in:

2) Wet or dry? first off, ‘dry’ wine is just as wet as its opposite, which the vino-grads insist on calling ‘sweet’. Sorry, monsieur, the opposite of ‘sweet’ is ‘sour’. Get it together. Plus, you spill a half-bottle of ‘dry’ {sic} wine in your lap, you know it right away. Ok, maybe later, when you wake up, but still…
3) Wines each have their own un-pronounceable name, usually French or Italian. Like, there’s Chablis, for example (pron ‘CHAB-less’) and Cabernet (as in ‘cabinet’, but with an ‘er’) On second thought, don’t bother. You’ll only embarrass your illiterate ass. Personally, I’d rather be filmed ‘having my way’ with my rubber chicken entree at the head table than to be over-heard murdering a dying language. And finally:
4) Wines have dates attached. Kinda like automobiles, so you can tell if you got a nice fresh recent one. And like cars, I usually go with the oldest one on the shelf. Figure, it probably costs a lot less.
So there ya go. Oh, some of the Italian wines come in a jug-thingy, with a thumb-hole so you can pour it down your throat easier. But now we’re beyond the scope of this article, not to mention the woven straw baskets some of the wines come in. When I find out more, I’ll post it here. I’m only 62, remember.

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Wu: Sounds to me like you’re expecting an elegant visitor and you’re panicking, afraid you’ll reveal your class-less sorry self.
Me: Hmm…you little spy, you! And anyway,not just ‘elegant’, no, this is the woman they freaking named elegance after. Like ‘Hellenistic’, after what’s her name, Helen somebody from Troy, NY. A rocket engineer, she worked in the control room at Vandenburg for like decades. ‘The face that launched a thousand space-ships’.
Wu: Yer babbling, guy. Get a hold of yourself. Do a dry-run somewhere. Practice.
Me: No funds, Wu. This is chapter 11, you read the title? Plus steaks, that’s just more problems..
Wu: What’s to worry? There’s ‘Rare’, you don’t encounter them often so no problem there, then ‘Medium’, they’re the steaks which channel your ancestors’ spirits from underneath the table; you need that like another nose, so pass, and finally, my expert advice, ‘Well Done’. Like, duh, the name sez it all, Johnny…
Me: How come now I’m even more nervous?

   Ok, it doesn’t take a Rain-man savant to figure I might have paid a bit more than market price for my first ‘free’ breakfast omelet. The cage including lathe frame, full chicken-wire around and above, the nesting stand, feed dishes, feed at 70 shekels for 30 kilos, yeah, the numbers add up.
Seven (7) days I waited patiently after their arrival, until the pleasant surprise just a few minutes ago. Admirably non-judgemental t’was I. No scolding sign screaming “Eggs or Schnitzel, you-uns decide!”, no standing near the coop demonstratively looking at my watch muttering under my breath “Time is money, pigeons.”
Kinda reminds me of my style with customers. I always prefer to let them pay on their own volition, even if I have to mingle with ‘em near the frozen fish at the supermarket without commenting on the debt. I’m thought of in these parts, for my kindness, as a total sucker; a ‘freier’ is our word for it, presumably from yiddish. Yet the warm feeling of allowing someone, some fellow ‘there but for fortune go I’ to pay when he gets the cash is as rewarding for me as it is for him. I hope.
Anyway, the egg pictured works out to about 350 shekels, not including labour. Here, eggs are less than a shekel apiece, not to mention that the little egg  from the proud Arabian hen weighs less than I can jism on a good hair day if I like you.
Oh well. I’ll get back to ya’all in about a year with a further business report.

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On a sadder note, I wasn’t just sitting around licking paper plates this week. Helped out with a video-shoot for a local winery. Even finessed a gig for a buddy of mine, Murphy, as a stage-hand. He’s short, real short; in fact one leg is shorter than the other; possibly un-diagnosed childhood polio.
Anyway, he was happily carrying grapes onto the stage when a couple of the owners arrogantly decided to roughly remove him from the scene, squashing produce in the process. I’m assuming they feared the ‘runt’ might be caught on-camera, damaging their image and product-placement.  Sad. I really debated calling the local rag-sheet,
the ‘Netanya Tattler’ to do an expose on their thoughtlessness.
If they had an English edition, they could have run with the headline:
Group of loco locals gripe; grope ‘grupsich‘ grip’s grapes.”
Oh well, me’n Murph will never drink Shabby Bros Chablis ever again. Serves ‘em right.
 Now back to breakfast…

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Wu: File under ‘shoulda happened’.
Me: Fair enough, but the egg is real, guy. I’m not that good in Photoshop.

     Svetlana was right, looking back…and down. The roof collapsed about 3 AM. But first:
“Johnny, lets just ditch this douche-bag of a dacha.” was her heavily-accented reaction when we first saw the storm damage. I wasn’t swayed, having sold my only gold to buy the place, from a fly-by-night outfit, B-C-A Ltd. “B near the C of A-zov!” they boasted, luring me in for the kill.
“Dear, we can weekend in the weakened structure, at least.” I suggested,looking for a compromise.

The grounds were full of junk when we arrived the following Thursday evening; tin cans, tuna tins, canteens, scraps of roofing flashing. We hadn’t seen it earlier, on the first visit after the storm. I started to put the stuff in a box, for recycling by weight. She frowned: “All that glitters is not gold.” Svetya pronounced smugly.
“But all that litter’s not that old.” I ‘corrected’ her. “Gee,just think of the pennies we’ll get for this treasure trove.”
Svetlana was already at the front door, hanging on one hinge with its window smeared in Black Sea mud. She wrote with her finger, the letters looking oddly Cyrilic: “YRUNYMI Here?” I struggled with the ‘Russian’ until I sounded it out.
“To take a leak, I guess.” I tossed off as I walked to the corner of the yard to piss. When I came back my ‘partner in Crimea’ was still there, this time writing, in the space available “CCCP”. “Now that’s Russian.” she scolded me. “Means ‘a failed little hut where we urinate in public’.”
    And so some time later that night the sounds started; the tentative screeches of cheap-steel nails pulling out of their positions. Having vouched for the structure’s integrity, I put my hands over her ears as she fell back asleep.
Svetya was lucky. The main beam missed her, instead falling squarely across my neck. I never had a chance. I hear she’s since restored the place, turned it into a ‘zula’ Oh well.

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(taken mostly verbatim from last night’s dream)

Don’t panic; ‘OBL’ is, and was, (long before the current infamous Slain Beast who usurped her name),
‘Ordinaria been Louden’, aka Ordinary-but Loud,  an always captivating writer and positive presence on
Xanga.
I’d asked publicly here ‘for whom the cacti bloom?” a few days ago, and now the mystery seems to
have been solved! OBL’s birthday is tomorrow, 5 May, and my fervent succulents must’ve sensed it
hanging in the air.
Gaze at the photo, y’all. Prettier than any Pentagon exit/entrance wounds by a wide margin. God kinda knows what he’s doing, in the long run, it turns out.
But how did the eye-less ear-less prickly guys know it was her birthday? Probably thru spy-satelite
intercepts, but I’ll get our own spooks on it right away. We’re not too shabby on remote ops ourselves,
if I may boast a bit.

    I get my news from an iffy WIFI/Google-News connection. Yesterday I could load only the headlines, so I’ll have to extrapolate a bit on my own I guess.
First question: So what about George and Ringo? I mean, Ringo even kept the beat in the Beatles, kind of.
Oops, maybe it said ‘beautified’. Ok, I can see doing a make-over for Paul and Ringo on a modest budget. John and George might indeed need the 1.5 million bucks the Vatican donated to the cause, if I read the news right.
Maybe I underestimate the relious depth of the whole process; after all, I got just this little blurb to go on. Alan Watts talked about ‘Be here now’ in his famous book. Probably the latest thinking is that man needs to like, ‘Be somewhere, whatevah’ and we’re starting with the stars, role-models for today’s nowhere men?
Wait. No comma between John and Paul, I just noticed. I may be like embarrassingly all wet.

Forget everything up to here. It’s Pope John Paul, duh! And they’re taking his You-tube clips, and adding a modern beat, drums and bass… maybe touching up his hair and nails in the process? Now if I can ever get videos to load I’ll have something to say on the subject. Something a little smarter.

Hmm, could be. Then again maybe not. Beats me. I gotta ‘be-at’ work in ten minutes.

Nothing incriminating to reveal here, although I do kinda blow Rules 1 and 2 below.
Feels like almost since birth I have been counted on to keep secrets. Maybe everyone has. Hard to tell; the best of ‘em never let on.
Whether it’s a lifetime of private romantic affairs, or watching a million dollars of contraband being cut up, weighed and bagged in your bedroom, or digging tunnels underground at night to circumvent OSHA,  constructing bullet-proof aliases for assets, or, hell, lets even add going to second grade with your cereal-box Ped-ometer® hot-wired, to silence that tell-tale ‘click’, fearing its confiscation or theft by bullies, keeping secrets… yeah, it’s who I am. Without further ado:

Rule One: Never, ever, divulge the Truth. A kind of ‘duh’ foundation-premise. The devil, though is in the details, as usual.

Rule Two: Don’t even let on that you ‘have’ a secret. We could call this ‘Poker-face 101′. Prepare, in advance, diversionary talking-points for when you feel threatened. Both to lead the adversary astray, and equally, to keep your own mind and facial expression off the subject.

Rule Three: The toughest one. Learn to portray yourself widely as a simple-minded dumb-fuck, to whom no one in his or her right mind would share anything worthy of confidence.

And therein we have The Problem. I am nothing if not a machine on two legs which thrives emotionally on his public image as a quick-witted, over-endowed thinker. ‘Smart enough to pretend convincingly to be stoopid’; sounds easy on paper; I cain’t seem to pull it off well these days.

I could go on about Technique: Dirtying ones hands believably before using the ‘flat-tire’ excuse for lateness, the standard Scotch-tape on the door-frame, raking the sand smooth, ready for footprints, behind yourself on every exit, carefully checking sight-lines, work-habits, plate numbers…
One small agricultural test-plot here might raise questions; I’m undecided between using
A) “Hmm.. looks like whoever farmed here before had some monkey-business on the side.”

B) “Yeah, that’s a rare Purple Aster, it’s called ‘Mock-cannabis’, whatever that means.”

Or C) “I’ve never seen Okra come up looking like that. Think I oughta ask for my money back?”

I’ll decide, when the time comes, in extremis I guess. The truth, ‘not for me, for a friend’, only makes things worse, I hear. And greenery is only a small side-show among my challenges.
One could say that eternal vigilance keeps you on your toes. Pins and needles is perhaps more accurate. The little pricks and wounds sometimes become infected.
But the newly-understood down-side, and why I chose to write this, is that ceaseless fabrication relentlessly drives out true memory, especially at my advanced age. I am currently working over-time trying to remember and reconstruct every possible detail of my life with the dear girl pictured in the last post, and I find myself repeatedly ‘remembering’ vignettes, only to realize that they are/were, in fact, tactical cover-stories, useful at the time and then not cleanly erased.
‘JB’, a dear friend and successful ‘merchant’ in his day, once revealed one of his tricks: ‘Tell a guy three things he already knows, in ‘confidence’, so to speak, and he’ll almost always knee-jerk tell you something you didn’t know.’ It worked well for him.
He also told me once : “You couldn’t do what I do.”, without explaining exactly why not. Hurt my feelings at the time, but I may now be starting to understand. Nothing, no earthly reward, is, for me, worth the price of presenting myself as a clue-less out-of-the-loop player. It goes against my grain, and he sensed that.

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Wu: Readers are lining up as we speak to play against you in poker, knowing  now that they’ll see your current hand reflected in your eyes.
Me: Aw, I’m working on it, Wuzie. Practicing once again in a mirror.
Wu: But your heart’s not in it anymore, right?
Me: What heart?