42

I was told by two different psychics that I would be dead at age 42. They would be the first to say that they were not psychics. They were transcendental transition guides or previous existence facilitators or some such bullshit. They were psychics. Why I spoke to these two people on two separate occasions is a story unto itself, but this is not that.

As the fates would have it, I was John Kennedy in my last life. Everybody is always someone famous in a past life. No one ever seems to be a dirt farmer or the guy who invented measles.

Delving into the spooky dust to uncover my noteworthy past was a fairly simple process. It is all about numbers.

Kennedy died seven years before I was born. According to some, your ghost needs to rest for seven years before possessing some other sucker. Kennedy’s last name has seven letters, as does mine. Both of our names begin with consonants and are immediately followed by vowels. They end the same way, assuming that Y is a vowel.

Kennedy was born in 1917. I was born in 1970. He was born May 29 and I was born May 31. This discrepancy can be easily explained since I was born very early in the morning, practically on the 30th and he was born late on the 29th. If you adjust time zones then we were practically born on the same date.

Needless to say, but said nonetheless, we are both Geminis. Gemini is the twin sign.

John was commonly called Jack by his friends and family. My first name can also be shortened to a four letter nickname.

Kennedy’s first wife had a French name spelled the French way rather than the more common English way, as did mine. If you combine their names, you get a famous author, though I doubt this has any bearing on the case.

The president and I have similar medical histories, although I have yet to injure my back in World War II. Kennedy was pronounced dead three times in his life. I am still working on number one.

Taking all of this and the fact that Kennedy died at 42 into consideration, and crunching the numbers, it was determined that I would die at 42.

What none of the psychics knew and I only thought about later was that Kennedy had a childhood friend that he knew for the rest of his life named Lem while I have a childhood friend named Ken. Both of their initials are the same (Lem is a nickname). Lem was the third child to a man named Fred and a mother with British ancestors.

It might be irrelevant to my fall from world power, but it was an open secret that Lem was a flaming homo. One of my temporary lady companions once told me that Ken was “as gay as disco”. Her source was his wife, whom she claimed had claimed that Ken could not function as a man unless he was with other men. It might be worth noting that this particular temporary lady companion was a compulsive liar who told me that one of the cashiers at our local grocery store was her best friend despite the fact that this cashier had no idea who she was.

Ignoring that reincarnation is supposed to let us move on to a higher state of existence and that going from President of the United States to me is probably a step or two in the wrong direction, there are a few flaws in this theory.

Both of our last names indeed have consonants followed by vowels, as do most family names in the English speaking world. Both of our last names have seven letters, but his full name was John Fitzgerald Francis Kennedy. Mine is considerably shorter.

It is true that I was born very early in the morning, but Kennedy was born at 3pm Massachusetts time. Adjusting for time zone differences, our birth dates are 37 hours apart. That is not the same day by any definition.

We are both Geminis, but according to Chinese signs, he was born in the year of the snake and I was born in the year of the dog.

Our first names can be abbreviated into shorter nicknames. He was commonly called Jack. No one at any point in my life has ever called me by my four letter abbreviation. I would not even know that someone was talking to me if they did.

Our wives had absolutely nothing in common.

I was supposed to die at 42 because of the numbers and the fact that Kennedy died at 42. Except that he was 46 when he died.

It only occurred to me after I typed this up that I am 43 years old in my current time zone. In the United States, where I was told that I would die at 42, I am still 42. I suppose we will have to wait and see what happens.

The Wonderful World Of Literary Criticism

There is a website called amazon.com. It has nothing to do with the Brazilian rainforest. It sells things. Specifically, it sells anything under the sun that can be legally traded for cash or credit.

In addition to the anything under the sun that they sell, they also sell books. One can buy hardcover and/or paperback books and have them shipped within six to eight months, or one can buy what are called e-books. These are books that are not actually books, but computer files with the content of actual books. Sometimes the content of the e-book is exactly the same as the content of the real book. Sometimes the content is nothing like the real book. Sometimes the e-book is such a piece of shit that no publisher in the world would ever print it as a real book, such as “Cupids [sic] Arrow Hits The Target”.

I prefer real books. For one thing, they are real. For another, and this part might be more important, they were written, edited, proofread and published by professionals. Perhaps they are not always written by professionals, such as Cybill Shepherd’s autobiography, but a published book is usually edited by someone who understands the basic rules of spelling, grammar and punctuation. Amazon, as a publisher, will sell absolutely anything. I do not simply mean Danielle Steel versus Leo Tolstoy. If you are ten years old and illiterate, Amazon will publish and sell your Great American Novel. Some of the crap I have seen on Amazon makes Danielle Steel look like Mary Anne Evans.

This is why critics were invented. As we all know, critics are the wisest amongst us who can take us by the hand and guide us through the dreck and into the wonderful world of literature.

Once upon a time there was something called a newspaper. Every major city had one and people read them even if they had no internet connection at home. In the city of New York there was such a newspaper, called The New York Times. In addition to creating a vast liberal conspiracy, it published reviews of the latest books. Or rather, the latest books that its esteemed critics deemed worthy of our considerations.

Praise by The New York Times Book Review almost guaranteed a best seller, just as any shitcanning would almost always cause sales to plummet. For good or ill, people are sheep and will generally like what they are told to like.

This used to bother me because I believe that critics, by and large, are fundamentally a waste of space. No one on the planet can tell me what I will and will not like better than I. There is no reason to assume that I will hate something just because Pauline Kael hated it. In fact, I am more likely to like that which she hated.

I realize that Pauline Kael was a film critic, but she is an excellent example of someone whose opinions I am supposed to agree with but rarely do.

But that was the past. Now anyone can be a critic. Now everyone is a critic. People buy their real books and e-books based not on what newspaper critics tell them they should like, but based on the inane ramblings of anonymous strangers. If Alison Arngrim’s autobiography gets mostly five star reviews, it will be a bestseller. I have nothing against Ms Arngrim, and found her performances superior to Melissa Sue Anderson’s, but is her book a greater work of literature than Theodore Roosevelt’s autobiography? According to the reviews at Amazon it is.

Critics of the past may have had an inflated sense of their own importance, but at least most of them could coherently put four or five words together. The aforementioned Pauline Kael was a bit of a douchebag, but she was a capable and often witty writer. “Joseph Doerr” (see below) is simply an idiot.

One could easily argue that I am only complaining because of bad reviews of my own work. However, my latest masterpiece has received nothing but high praise to date. The fact that it only has one review and that I know the reviewer personally is irrelevant. It has 100% five star reviews. In the world of selling your crap online, this is all that matters.

My complaint is not that any idiot can write an illiterate review of my work and damage the enormous income I earn from those 70¢ royalties. My complaint is that any idiot can write illiterate reviews of absolutely anything while I can review absolutely nothing.

I do not own any electronic reading device. But I own a computer, and that computer has a program that can read e-books. I still prefer actual books, but e-books are terribly convenient and take up far less space. My computer could probably hold a thousand times as many books as the largest bookshelf I have ever had were it not already full of midget donkey porn.

Since I have a computer, and since I live in a land where books are hard to come by and mostly turn to compost in the constant oppressive heat and humidity, I have begun to download e-books. At websites like Amazon, great works of world literature are often free or very inexpensive, while the giant chunks of shit have the highest prices. This works out in my favor since I prefer great works of world literature to giant chunks of shit, and everything for sale at Amazon costs at least two or three dollars more to those of us who refuse to live in the United States. This is ostensibly because shipping items from within the United States to without is more expensive. Amazon either does not realize that downloaded digital items require no postal services or, more likely, they simply want to charge more to as many people as possible.

Amazon has websites for the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Brazil and probably somewhere else, but I do not live in any of those nations either.

I can download free e-books onto my computerized reading program and actually read them. Whenever I do, Amazon is kind enough to make recommendations on other items I might enjoy, all based on previous items downloaded.

When one downloads something from Amazon, this is considered a “purchase”, despite the absence of any money changing hands. When one makes a “purchase”, Amazon invites one to review the item. This might be done to give customers the false hope that their opinions matter. In an effort to help out aspiring young authors, I thought I would display my usual benevolence and write a nice review or two.

However, to write a review, one must have actually purchased something and not simply “purchased” it. Despite being asked by Amazon robots to write reviews every time I downloaded something for free, I could not write a review because what I downloaded was free.




This only partially bothers me. I need not actually buy the item I wish to review, which is good since most e-books cost at least two or three dollars more to those of us who do not live in the United States. I can download an MP3 song file for 99¢ and then review “Admiration On Valentine’s Day”, which is seven pages long and costs US$102 for some reason. I would like to review this book because it looks great, from the cover all the way down to the riveting synopsis.

An excerpt:

“Who is this Red Rose that just walked in the she hot stuff,”………………………………….
“Thomas told David this Rosie one Melissa best friends, your luck she single.

Look out, WH Auden. Cintilante.

Unfortunately for the unpublishable at Amazon, I cannot download a 99¢ MP3 song.




Not only does Amazon charge extra for the privilege of buying their products from outside of the United States, but they also care enough about international relations to protect us from the evils of music.

While I am not allowed to post a literate review that might encourage someone to spend money at Amazon, real Americans can post the following:



You would think that after spending twelve years in high school, this person would know how to write a better review.

The good news for Amazon is that some of these reviews are positive, such as these glowing recommendations for Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, one of the world’s great novels.

A Better Never Did Itself Sustain Upon A Soldier’s Thigh

People talk to me all the time. Too often, in fact. If I were an anonymous face in the crowd I could probably get away with walking to the local opium den without anyone bothering me. As a local celebrity, I cannot so much as throw my bag of garbagie in the middle of the road without some stranger straining to bask in the warmth of my international fame.

The most frequent comments I get from random admirers are “Why you so handsome? I wish me/mine son and/or husband will be making of so attactness” and “You blog is most greatest blog is ever was, but is needing more recipes”. There is little I can do about the former. Baby Jesus made me as stunning as I am and the men in your life as banal as they are for a reason. Ours is not to question why. I have complete control over the latter.

Starting today, I will intersperse amongst my indelibly perceptive observations my incontrovertible opinions on mankind’s greatest works of film and literature. I will also share my recipe for banana muffins.

I had intended to begin with what I have no doubt would have been such a brilliant review of William Shakespeare’s Othello that Coleridge himself would have ejaculated in his own grave were he able, but I simply cannot get over what a bitch Othello is. I do not mean that the play is difficult to read or ingest. I mean that the character Othello is a punk. He thinks his wife is the shit, but totally caps her ass just because Iago talked smack about her. When I first read it, I was like, dude. I read it again recently and if I ever find Othello’s Facebook page I am so spamming the shit out of him.

The Moor of Venice? More like the Douchemoor of Venice.

Instead, we have an e-book version of a blog. Same difference.

“An American Teacher In Taiwan” by Ken Berglund is based on the famous blog of the same title and author. It is advertised as a guide to teaching English in Taiwan. I feel this part is misleading as much has changed since the author escaped to his homeland. Even if the labyrinth of Chinese bureaucracy was somehow the same today as it was five years ago, or even five months ago, no single person can give anyone a comprehensive view of the horrors that await them should they feel the need to follow in his footsteps. The arbitrary rules and regulations change from person to person and are enforced at whim.

However, this e-book is also advertised as “One writer’s experience about living, working, dating, finding love, and raising kids in a foreign country.” As a personal memoir, I cannot question its veracity. I can only confirm that many of the obstacles in adapting to life in a Chinese culture that the author experienced are universal to any American, or possibly even Canadian, in similar circumstances.

Mr Berglund relates an incident wherein he is induced to enter a “special” KTV by women of liberal morals and is only able to leave the establishment after forfeiting an unacceptably large sum of cash. Any robust red blooded male who has set foot in any Chinese country for more than twelve hours can relate to this situation.

If you want to know what kind of paperwork you must fill out and have stamped in triplicate to live in the Land of Scooter, this book will not help you. If you want to know what the people are like and how different their customs are from your own, this book covers a broad range of expatriate topics.

Some would say its range of topics is too broad. A guide to living in a foreign land or a travel guide should have a more narrow focus. But as a memoir, there is an even balance between personal insights (the part about his erectile dysfunction brought on by too many betel nuts) and general anecdotes (Chinamen be wacky). For this reason among others, I think this should be marketed as a memoir and not any kind of handbook.

While this e-book is probably more interesting to Americans who have lived or are now living in a foreign country, it is written in such a casual narrative that even a xenophobe who has never set foot outside of Itawamba, Mississippi might find it enjoyable.

I give it five muffins.