Welcome to Mirror-Times-Mirror.net, home of Mirror-Times-Mirror Trans-Media, where all that fits makes its own virtual space to fit in, deeply piled, multi-layered, & trans-dimensional.
Translation: Mirror-Times-Mirror Trans Media, publisher of The Mirror-Times-Mirror Telegraph Messenger, MPRR (Mime Public Radio Review, & More-On-This/ More-On-That, etc., welcomes you to this strangely looped world we co-occupy.
So does Bods Library, which hosts the website that creates the space that Mirror-Times-Mirror transmitted materials appear in, a.k.a.
BLAMA: Bod Library’s Assorted Media Annex ,
BLUMA, Bod Library’s Unsorted Media Annex,
BLAHM, Bod-Library’s Annex for Humor’n Media.
Whatever you call it, more & less than what you must expect, no matter what you think starting out–&/or falling in.
By special arrangement with the _[Blank]_ Peninsula Independent Press Association, the annex serves as official repository for a Random Collection of Sporadic Deposits, more or less as transmitted by Mirror-Times-Mirror Trans Media’s Tri-Modular Translation Magician Technology by which words, information, images, ideas, & misconceptions scooped up by data-bots in the cloud may cross geography & transcend dimensions.
The less-is-usually-more principle presumably applies, however, as transmissions received by the library: 1) exceed its ability to process & present; 2) make little or no sense in the formats received; 3) need at least some editing & ordering to be intelligibly accessible to library visitors.
Whether they’ve realized it yet or not, many visitors have already wondered something like, “why ‘blank’?” Some may have looked in atlases for a Blank Peninsula, presumably without success. Names can be funny things, especially where locations in time, space & languages are involved. So can aliases, mis-typings, mis-readings & the mis-heard also, though rarely as funny, as common or as elegant as mis-translations!
“All media involves mis-translation,” claimed one trans-media critic (who bought Trans Media shares low & sold out before release of his book, The Mis-Translation is the Message, “to avoid appearance of a conflict of interest”). Even the live recording gets cut, cropped, framed & angled.
It’s often been said, the description is not the thing, event or subject described, but even this is not always so, or true, as when describing description here, for example, or in yet another Alice’s Reflections on the Looking Glass (complete with nude selfies), or possibly the new & still unabridged Understanding Gibberish, presented in its own language (Dix Ex Press).
Pursuant to the current PIPA-MTMTM-BOD DA (Deposit Agreement), the library must share access to more or less randomly selected PIPA deposits as space, time & short-attention-span permit, subject to mis-transmission, mis-translation, & mis-typing (the 3 mt’s), with mis-conception & mis-accounting in reserve.
Please note that none in the “chain of evidence” are necessarily responsible for the content, form, or accuracy of what’s reported. In fact, PIPA, the independent press association, although it used to have its own press, doesn’t write most reports, articles, stories, words or descriptions it sends along for Trans Media transmission to the Bod Annex–which selects, edits & re-transmits to you.
No, PIPA Has already selected–& in many cases re-edited, condensed, excerpted, interpreted &/or deleted–from publications of its members–not all of whom guarantee the accuracy of their reports or names of their reporters, except under legitimate subpoena.
Being fully compliant with freedom of misinformation act of 1497, the right to remain silent, & current rules of the Witless Protection Program, PIPA remains mindful of the need to balance privacy with transparency; transparency with visibility; & visibility with anonymity, without losing sight of what advertiser brand recognition says about the society portrayed: kaching!
While member publications may be wholly or partly supported by advertisers, subscribers, organizations, associations, parties, causes, special interest groups, intelligence agencies, &/or rogue conspiracies, PIPA itself remains “un-beholden, independent & disloyal to all but the long-term best interests of press, people & place, so help us Claude.”
Sometimes it’s not easy to distinguish what one sees via media from reality, on the one hand, & imagination, on the other. Each publication exercises editorial freedom in selection, timing, sequence, layout, while dangling subject & angle to draw in the susceptible &/or pander to its fans.
PIPA (&/or M-T-M Trans Media) then do the same from another height, angle, scale & order of magnitude, to ultimately choose &/or transmit contents that “either randomly reflect the state of the society & its cultures or otherwise fill space-time, heighten attention, provoke reflection, make gawkers blink (twice), earn an Absurd Seal of Approval for Hilarious Accuracy from the Absurd Society in Absentia, a Hilarity Charity.
“Our peninsula may be more ridiculous than average,” say PIPA spokespersons, “or may not. Not even you can know for sure, being potentially so exceptional yourself–let alone the peninsulas you know well. As th enovel says, “All characters are entirely fictional, whether composites from supposedly real people or purely imaginary entities, with any resemblance to actual people, places &/or events coincidental.”
[“Coincidence simply means incidents co-happening at the same time, not necessarily connected, not necessarily not connected.” —Dick’s Handy Random Digital Pocket-Watch Dictionary, from Dick’s Ex Press, Port Hole.]
It’s not as if there is any longer a clear distinction between what’s a mirror, & what’s a window, & what’s a screen–video, tv, film, phone, laptop, wall in a virtual surround-world… Even in the old days, one might see reflections in, of & off window glass, or open a mirror to find a medicine cabinet hidden behind. Most such distinctions have blurred into sharper focus, however, as screens, glass, & reflective instruments converged.
Convergence was not always benign, let alone pretty, whether employed by the Stasi (secret security surveillance service) or the sex addict superintendent at the Model Apartment Complex behind the Periphery Center East Strip Mall. Such will not happen here, where trustworthy security agents & tender superintendents have more critical fish to fry.
“We will protect your privacy, the privacy of our sources, & our own privates to the extent required by law.” –Anonymous Attorneys acting on behalf of the Sacred Nudist Army of the Charitable Heart, a transparent public 3C-511-43B tax deductible organization with anonymous donors, trustees & recipients.
“Persistent investigators will easily identify the peninsula’s places, people & events, its cultural artifacts, sciences & arts, its entertainments & literatures, products & promotions, propaganda & puffery. Answers to all questions, if they exist at all, are at least represented here–where warped words & aging optic nerds turn transitory experience into longer-term revelation, as part of a comprehensive program of cheap laugh therapy….”
Back to the Bod(s): Director of Library Services Yours Crudely retains the right–indeed the duty–to select, edit, unselect, interpret, & re-imagine materials as transmitted, mis-heard &/or mis-transcribed, as well as add warnings, comments & mustaches to selfies. Still, deposits are mostly meant to speak for themselves &/or their imagined realities, whichever comes & goes first, so the library disavows responsibility for the media, contents, & world(s) ostensibly reflected, reported, reviewed, & potentially reformed…. [Caution: Reformation in progress. Proceed with care.].
Thanks to the Bod’s handy random excerpt & selection-skipping technology, contents may be considered representative of the world that produced &/or warped them in the first place, however accidentally. Any resemblance to entities & events on other peninsulas may be considered–purely coincidental; inevitable; highly revealing; in the eye-ear-&/or-nose of the beholder; a bonus.
As to which peninsula & where it dangles from what, for the moment we’re just calling it the ____, the Blank, for reasons that should become clear shortly, but probably won’t. The PIPA fills in the blank in its own ways, as not at media references use the same terms through time–or use the same language or seem to live in the same world.
Few geographers are likely to describe these worlds as parallel, however, as their relationship may more closely resemble the irregular squiggles of a topo map to the nodes of a multi-dimensional web, with nodules of dueling modules, through a funhouse of fake mirrors & windows (with trap-door floors, slides & squirts of air), with choice of routes–e.g., tunnel of love shortcut or the short attention span suspension bridge?
And to where? It’s not as if the Blank Peninsula is one place only, let alone ever relatively empty. If space has commanded less of a premium than time, it’s just because there’s so much more of it. From purple mountains with blue moons to red rocks with bottomless gorges & green valleys with fuscia grapes to high plains with lightning, all the way to endless coast, never fully measured, from the rocky outcrops at Last Spit Point to the slippery docks & slick side-streets of infamous spots like Port Hole.
Whether to avoid unnecessary embarrassment or legal implications of a distracting nature, names are sometimes tweaked–of people, brands, titles &/or places. Otherwise, they are tweaked simply by being mis-heard, mis-transcribed &/or mis-imagined, especially common when dictation is oral & the receiver’s banana is barely hard of earring. Thus the old conclusion, bananas make poor antennas.
If only to protect themselves from unnecessary moisture, Bod librarians follow the Dui Dismell system, as whim may warrant or law require, taking no responsibility for the world portrayed, mis-represented or re-imagined, by “closing one’s nose & remaining blindfolded if necessary.” (See Eyeless Origami for details of the blind folding & unfolding systems.)
[Blindfolding is achieved conceptually by a combination of: PIPA Synapse; Port Hole cut-outs; copious quantities of Alice’s Inn Cider’s hardest; & 3-card Handy Monty, so, absent fingerprints &/or DNA analysis, no one actually knows the exact source of deposits. PIPA synapse refers to the Peninsula Independent Press Association’s transmission protocol, which may attribute to any of various other actual peninsulas (& imaginary peninsula aliases).
Using Port Hole cut-outs allows material from one peninsula to be attributed to another, in other words, & sometimes vice versa. With Alice’s Inn Cider to loosen the tongue & lubricate the game, 3-hand Monty offers a last flip, so not even he knows which library card is where or whose anymore.]
In the Realm of the Ridiculous, all potentially slanderous, libelous, handle-less, sandal-less &/or scandalous materials may be considered “in the eye of the beholder,” as a matter of principle, however invisible to the seer.
In that respect, librarians are beholders also. So the librarian may exercise judgment, if only whether & where a deposit should be put, in which hole filed. Such judgment, if any, is, however, not based primarily on personal taste, at least in theory. There is after all the possibly poorer taste of some friends we also hope to serve.
A library does not exist in a vacuum (except at the quantum scale, popping in & out of existence in few billionths of a second), but serves its society–potentially tomorrow’s more than today’s. Without trying to be all things for all people, a library’s collection as a whole may help make a mosaic portrait of the society’s scrambled media kaleidoscope at large.
The shards of such a society need not look like a face, except as seen through a series of mirrors & reflections in windows. If some materials clearly seem completely ridiculous, some just foolish, & others simply poorly written, well, show us a library where this isn’t so.
Still, the Bod Library is not just any library, & especially in just this regard, first since almost all our materials are composed in-house, & second, because the Bod PIPA Depository receives much of its stream of ridiculous content directly from Mirror-Times-Mirror Trans Media via BLAMA’s Alpha Headquarters in Disconnectady, at the heart of the Bermuda Shorts triangle.
As a result, the eye of the beholder may at any given time belong to you, a filing librarian, transmitter, Miss Typist, PIPA editor, publication editor, copy-writer, re-copy re-writer, reporter, witnesses interviewed, expert consulted, self-reference fellow, mis-translator, MPR announcer, actor, double, alias, &/or narrator using the author’s name (e.g., Yours Crudely).
Is that ridiculous or what? Possibly ridiculous and what, for at least one fictional information scientist sees a counter-intuitive self-corrective in the arrangement (or, as he calls it, the “derangement”). You may judge for yourself, provided you bring your own gavel, as required in the new DIY version of Kafka’s Court of Pointless Appeals–where defendants must sentence themselves to the guaranteed minimum maximum set by the current maximum minimum laws (adjusted for inflation) & juries are routinely hung.
On a clear day, you may or may not think you recognize people & entities in articles, reviews, reports, &/or opinion pieces, but you should be more or less always be able to tell when content is being spun by professional gyros, spin-meisters, & neuro-psychological hacks for commercial &/or political persuasion. In case you can’t tell, anonymous Yours Crudely may try to clue you in, as reporter, transcriber, librarian, or fictional narrator on duty.
PIPA is headquartered in the Mirror-Times-Mirror Building, in the bleeding heart of Mirror-Times-Mirror Square, where uptown & downtown Periphery Center meet to cross the street. Its host, Mirror-Times-Mirror Trans Media, charges PIPA nothing for use of space, equipment, & personnel; PIPA adds 10% before charging its users nothing in return.
Some say cheap at twice the price. Some say, you get what you pay for. In this case, we say, you get what you don’t pay for–thanks to the non-commercial network of Mirror-Times-Mirror BLAM-sites supported by hosts, ghosts & the Holy Goat Fund for Irresponsible Journalism, Yours Crudely, Director.
Some dislocation necessarily goes with the territory. As indicated, PIPA materials may be intentionally derationalized, mist-translated & disconnected with reality in the process of selection, transmission, & filing, which Mirror-Times-Mirror readers may attribute to inherent aspects of media technology usually left unsaid (even by MPR mimes).
In criminal investigations, detectives follow “the money, the honey & the breadcrumbs,” as one hard-boiled private i put it. In trans-media analysis, neuro-psychologists follow the blinking light, electric sound & sizzling neuron smell. For the former, they can now distinguish between the speed of light through a network of mirror-neurons & through a pitcher of lite beer (chilled to slow & measured with Lithuanian lager lasers). Eventually, light gets to the point, they toast their results, clink & empty their glasses.
Though each brings its own challenges, sounds are easier for librarians to deal with than smells, whether to catalog, file, access, pass along, or control in the visitor’s immediate environment. Nevertheless, we are beginning to smell danger ahead, especially below, and suggest new visitors check other menu items before coming back for a deeper plumbing some other time, with enough fresh attention to start Chapter 2 as if it were #1.]
#2. STOP: LOOK: LISTEN:
UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
BOTTOMLESS HOLE AHEAD–
Mapping the Unmappable Mirror…
Eventually, we hope to do better justice to all dimensions of warped space-time, including at least 8 dimensions of virtuality: pre-past, past, post-nasal past, immanent future; pre-future & post-future; duration (at various magnitudes); post-duration; stillness & transcendence. Some of these are folded within others, as with fractal dimensions or orders of magnitude. From another angle, some folds are loops, & some loops scenic detours.
According to No Bull physicist Albert Mindstein (who discovered that the shortest distance between two points could be found just by falling through curved space, along with everything else in the known universe), time slows down when you speed up, until, at the the speed limit of light (& approaching the heart of a black hole), it seems to have stopped.
From the perspective of the light itself, it may be as if no time has passed from one point to another across the universe traversed. Nor does it exist in one place-time only, but is inherently “entangled,” like parts of a field are entangled, parts of an organism, parts of a network, parts of a society.
the universe
To locate ourselves in this multiply entangled network, the editorial we (i.e., Yours Crudely) must postulate a universe spread out in space-time-&-attention, with processing nodes that contain & reflect more than themselves alone. In one dimension, nodes contain their entanglements; in another, their family trees (some nuts, some fruits, some evergreens, etc.).
In another dimension still, nodes like ours reflect the worlds that pass through their reflection zones–transitory observations, creatures stopping to check themselves out, oblivious masses yearning to breed free; people with messages (madmen & admen, teachers & prophets, artists & poets, idiots & ideologues, on-line librarians & over-the-line more-on club members, janitor bosses & executive flunkies; writer & reader; editor & re-writer); comet & asteroid; etc.
“If there’s one thing for sure about the universe,” claimed Mindstein, it’s that there’s still an et cetera, & so forth,” the equations for which he never found, solved or completed, despite a lifetime trying, into a final ellipses….
Those interested in how the universe we came to be in came to be, & how physics came to be, still re-inventing itself, can leave a note in the “COMMENTS” section (or otherwise contact the BLAM librarian).
The writer (Yours Crudely) has previously deposited drafts that were automatically (& accumulatively) published on this site. Having just been read as if for the first time by the site’s editor (co-incidentally, also Yours Crudely), & judged “unreadable,” these materials have been removed to “an undisclosed dislocation” for later attempt to decipher, re-translate, &/or re-file. These were not the only “unreadable” materials in this room (or on this page), however. Others presumably exist in the TMI Zone.
WARNING: YOU PROBABLY DON’T WANT TO CROSS BELOW THIS LINE NOW! All materials below are in the officially designated TMI/ Too Much Information Zone. At least until the Bod’s Otto Editor can have a look, & do a little re-disorganizing, you may want to skim menu items at the top instead, each room with its own top, each page with its peaches & creams.
Other rooms may include their own pits, too, and all sites are arguably early in their self-definition. Each room may be due for dusting, each card catalog overdue for shuffling. Ridiculous materials flow up faster than we’d want to shelve them, but even when selected from entries on digital pinheads, still wet behind the ears. By being composed, uploaded & rearranged on line, there is a larger chance of being re-read, re-written, & selectively deleted than if simply left on stored flash drives….
After you’ve gotten some hang of the territory, check back. You can scout the various piles below for informative tidbits, but stay prepared to come up for air as necessary. It’s a long way down. As the clerk at Maggie’s Pharmacy used to point out, “TMI is best taken in moderation,” before handing in his resignation by singing telegram.
“Also, with an empty head, open mind, & happy stomach.” Although routinely prescribed by professors with doctorates at elite medical schools, TMI has never been fully tested in head to head trials, for example, up against Placebo Pharmaceutical’s blockbuster Nothing–totally organic, natural, with no added ingredients (no poisons like the sugar in rivals’ sugar pills).
We understand that odds-makers are divided in how they rank TMI’s & placebos like Sweet Nothings, Scentsless, & Nada Mucho. Some believe there is no place for either in a non-commercial peninsula depositary, arguing they are matters best left to the dispensary instead.
That raises the wiggly issue of reflexively reflective non-commercialism. How can we, mirror-times-mirror on a more or less significantly commercial world, consider ourselves non-co0mmercial? What about the ads we take money to re-print, the products we cover to fill air-space, the classified ads with top secret information embedded, the reports we digest, condense & re-report with the jargon, crapola & boilerplate removed?
No problem. Commercial incentives to warp coverage has been largely removed by mis-use of dislocation & mis-identification aps, so that nothing advertised, promoted, praised or panned can actually be bought outside of the un-identified source peninsula.
========================================
TOO MUCH INFORMATION ZONE–Proceed, if at all, with caution.
the website(s), the entities
At Mirror-Times-Mirror Trans-Media we take this a step or two further, with hops, skips, slips, slides & jumps thrown it for good measure at no extra cost, since the service is free–thus cheap at twice the price. (Our No Money Back Guarantee comes with a two-lifetime warranty, a no-expiration-date clause, & Don’t Bother Instructions, as well as terms & conditions, limits & disqualifications on file in our medicine cabinet.)
In our trans-media funhouse of the imagination running amuck, the content of creation & the virtual space created to hold, transmit & show it (in my mind at one time, yours in another) often happen together, more or less simultaneously. As fingers tap the keyboard keys, virtual lines appear (& can be deleted) along with the text they occupy, space & its content.
Material can also be uploaded as a whole file or an excerpt pasted in, creating as much space as required for as many pre-composed lines–or even pages–, or images taken at various times. (These can also be compressed in a file (like a pdf.), opening only when clicked, & closing again when clicked off, into & out of a visual screen-space otherwise not there.
In any case, even if seemingly seen from outside, all the representations found in this realm take place in the virtual world of inward-created (inwardly received) space. Where inward & outward meet & exchange contact information is, as the poets say, where the action is. The websites serve as the meeting place, hosting both library & visitors, just as the library hosts visitors & websites. With the exception of visitors, hosting & making are mostly synonymous.
What meant by the universe may seem more or less clear, though mostly unknown in just about every important respect. Ditto for the websites, except to note that the shared part of their respective addresses (mirror-times-mirror) derives from two entities that also share it in their name & addresses, namely Mirror-Times-Mirror Trans Media & its flagship property, The Mirror-Times-Mirror, both headquartered in the Mirror-Times-Mirror Building in the heart of Mirror-Times-Mirror Square, the market & media capital of the whole Dang Peninsula.
The websites currently making up the mirror-times-mirror triangle do not belong to Mirror-Times-Mirror Trans Media or its flagship property alone, however, not even including the parent company’s subsidiaries; network affiliations; broadcasting channels; literary & scientific reviews; radio, radar & weather stations; hospitality suites, motels & all-u-can-stomach buffets; lemonade- & night-stand outlets; magazine kiosks & goggles.
No, the Mirror-Times-Mirror entities lending their names, expertise & resources to the enterprise at hand do so, along with their fellows, as members of the Peninsula Independent Press Association, which represents “the whole shebang” (even non-members are represented), including its special arrangement & relationship with the greater Bod Library Complex, which, going a step further, ultimately does the hosting.
Bod Library hosts material from PIPA, which uses the resources of members to deposit at the Bod more information than will fit (or be welcome) in any other officially designated TMI Zone, particularly any associated with the Hole-Dang Peninsula. (By now, you presumably see why.)
———————————————–
STOP! YOU ARE ABOUT TO ENTER A DESIGNATED Too Much Information Footnote Zone. Too Much Information should be considered like a buffet with too much food, & no sneeze guard. You’re not expected to eat it all, let alone in one setting. Feel free to nibble, and come back often.
* Serious stuff means essays like “Humor & the Humanities,” “Laugh Therapy & Literature,” and “Cousin Kafka’s Crazy Quilting Club,” all of which we plan to put in the site’s Humor & Media room, when we get around to making one.
** APA calls itself “a secret front org for unaffiliated undercover operatives & card-carrying co-conspirators trained, funded & discoordinated by the Amorphous Postal Order of Heretics, Independent Contrarians, & 501-cu-later organization.”*** [A splinter group that calls itself APA AKA KAKA masquerades as a fraternity on college campuses.]
*** The cards these co-conspirators carry are presumably Bod L-O-L cards, held in endlessly variable combinations, & suitable for a variety of games. (Consult your local attorney major general for concealed carry laws applicable to L-O-L library cards in your state.)
****F.U.‘s, as members of the Footnoters Union are called, dig nothing more than “drilling down,” so double as drill leaders for the downer wing of the MORE-ON Movement–“a little more on this, a little more on that, soon you’ve got a whole lot more than you bargained for or ever expected, including deep holes still sinking &/or tall piles with unknown tipping points, so watch your step, wash your toes, down the hatch & up your nose,” as an old submarine ditty puts it. [For more on the Bod’s More-On Club, just keep going.*****]
***** “Don’t give up…the sheet!” cried Bull Sheet editor E. D. Headly in his final editorial, “Cut the crap, not the bull!” Despite his plea, the Bull’s owner cut a deal with his counterpart & snapped up The Port Hooch Dock Knot Hole, turning into The Port Hole Sun Knot Telegraph, & Headly was out of a job by the end of the day. His posthumous memoir years later, Far Too Late for Tears, lamented “having held on to the Bull far too long,” comparing himself to “a seaman who has grabbed onto the anchor chain, thrown it over the side, & won’t let go.”
[ You may take that as a warning not to try holding on beyond your maximum daily crap capacity (mdcc), with a grain of salt, &/or for whatever it’s worth on the open market. Reaching one’s mdcc limit needn’t mean holding up the white flag of surrender, but taking a break while still wanting more, a short intermission, giving the brainstem the chance to refresh itself, catching up with its better halves.]
Whether we’re talking about pants, bank-loans, white flags or armed robberies, actual hold ups are rare on the Mishugunah Peninsula, where there’s no easy escape.
As it says under “Crime” in the Visitor’s Guide, “For pants, there are suspenders; for bank-loans, hoops to jump through; for white flags, clouds do the honors, visible from deep in a hole…..” The point is that crime is explicitly prohibited, as well as implicitly discouraged.
Breaking the No Crime Law is often a more serious infraction than the crime committed, with punishments including banishment, bansihment, exile to X Isle, burial at sea, confinement in an enclosed space, &, for repeated offenses (like “unlawful repetition, rebroadcast, or rebranding of major league baseball”), a civilized revival of hanging called left dangling. As a result, the threat of armed robbery has been effectively eliminated along with the traditional penalty for hold-ups, loss of arms &/or the right to bear them.
~~~~~~~Unauthorized Personnel Only~~~~~~~.
TMI ZONE:
The following has
—–Too Much Information;
—–Too Little Value;
—–Too Many Twists;
—–Too Few Turns….
We advise you don’t even try to read it.
Reading, like knowing too much, can have serious consequences, including side-effects.
~~~~~~~~~~[No Exit Ahead.]
We can see from the fact that you’re still here,
you’re cursed with a taste perversely rare–
a real individual, with a mind of your own,
who won’t listen to reason, but must get your mind blown.
If we tell you, don’t read this bit,
hey–you’ve already read it,
if only to know what it had to say,
& how funny the sayer said it.
Rainy days are great for books,
easy chairs in cozy nooks,
with fishing lines that have no hooks,
schools of schnooks in babbling brooks.
You’ll catch your fill of crazy fish
that flip & flop, then splash & splish,
until you’re smart enough to wish
for something calmer on your dish.
Just turn the page, & you may find
what food for thought does to your mind,
nibbled riddles, lumps & grinds,
noodle-knots with double-binds.
Now ain’t you glad that, be what may,
the time you’ve spent is all you’ll pay?
You shouldn’t call it cheap advice,
since it’s just as cheap at twice the price.
~~–Yours Crudely, The Editorial Oui*
- Quoting from the “Closed Exit” billboard, prepared by Boastful Advertising for the Consolidated Agency for Commerce & Art, jointly funded by the tourist-loving towns of Stayout, Keepaway, & Closed:
“Exit here for No Vacancy Motel, the Closet Inn, Camp Closed (But-no Sitar), & Loserville (pool halls & dart bars). According to The History of the Closed Exit, “Closed had a distinguished history in its heyday.”
The in-lieu-of bible found in nightstands of the area’s Far Out Inns, for example, were once part of a “grand experiment in reverse psychology,” reportedly conducted by the top secret SLAP–Subliminal Laboratory for Advertising & Propaganda, which still officially denies its existence.
According to a heavily redacted report in the Russian version of Redactum, SLAP first bugged bibles & telephone directories, then replaced them with a series of versions tweaked to increase readership, promote products, and improve the bedside reading experience. An Interactive Bible gave way to Virtual Inquisition & the Psycho-Bates at Motel Pain, while other inns began featuring pleasure domes & libidinal wireless.
Closed itself soon became Clogged with sightseers, along with the simply curious. In its prime boom town days, even the No Vacancy had a waiting list. At its height, Closed was designated the spiritual headquarters of the WWC World-Wide Contrarian Union, while members of the Lodgers & Bedmakers Council declared the town as the planet’s “0-degrees of separation” point (an inn joke).
- Boom’s Bosom to Busted Flush tells how the Lost Head Lighthouse, at what had been the tip of Spit Tongue Point before getting washed out to sea in surges, became a can-can casino & hotbed of slam poetry. Renamed, No Head‘s an island now, surrounded by shoulders of kelp & treated sludge, as poet Johnny Done wrote: “No Head is an island, cut off by itself…”
- John is often mis-credited with the invention of ‘John verse,’ including, “Take your time, don’t rush. Enjoy these rhymes; when done, please flush,” a verse raising many controversial issues with literary historians, since supposedly written before indoor plumbing. [Rolls of John’s prize-winning collected poems are available in at No Head’s TP Museum, with its outhouse gift shop.]
MAP OF THE HOLE: a geo-illogical verbography
The Inverse Peninsula–IP;
from the tip of the top to the top of the tip,
ridge’s peaks to tides that rip,
suspension bridges incomplete,
partners bidding with their feet,
Outside Inns with inside suites.
Those Far Out Inns you love the most.
are found along the wild coast,
“But we get you higher!” mountains boast.
Rooms up high serve jams & toast,
tack postit notes to your bed-post
in case you wake & see a ghost,
“please don’t scream & wake your host;
enjoy the dream, & if you wake, the show
that friendly ghosts put on before they go.”
This map may be continued at some future date.
For now, we’ve had more than our fill,
so any more must wait until…
we’re no longer late
for our time at Boot Hill,
the far-out inn of fate,
famous in the east & west,
abode of heels, toes & hole-y soles,
drop in because you have no choice<
~~~stay for the eternal rest.
The Hole Inn, Port Alice, welcomes all the golfers, minors, miniature golfers, lovers, fans of the off-beat, exotic vagabonds, boaters & drifters, members of celebrities incognito anonymous, etc., it has room for at any given time. (Ask about our Real Time Share program, if crowded.) Every room has a view of the Hole–in some cases, more than one.
[Although Bod Library accepts no ads, sells no space, & buys no time, some PIPA deposits, clippings, & piles may. Like so-called “public broadcasting,” the Peninsula Independent Press Association calls itself “non-commmercial,” meaning it does not interrupt programs with spot ads, and mainly only advertises itself. It does give its program-sponsors–people, organizations &/or enterprises–a brief moment to identify themselves in appreciation.]
“A trip a thousand feet down can begin with a single footnote.”
—Falling Inn, sign in entry
“what falling water was to Wright,
Falling Inn may be to wrong–“
—Architectural Indigestion
“The Mishugunah Peninsula’s quite perverse.
Its humorous verse is even worse.”
—Verse for the Verse Averse
- THE VERSE-AVERSE Page/Room will be up soon.
Look for VERSE… on menu at top.
notes on notes
[The first of these, from Footnote Road,
was left by a toad whose mind was blowed.
The second tells it straight & true,
attached to cows with gorilla glue.
The last, alas, may make you scream
to wake the cockroach from his dream.*
* Following the “last shall be first principle,” this pithy couplet comes from The Cockroach Who Dreamed He Was Kafka, by Max Roach, owner of the Roach Motel & author of The Twisted History of the Stripped Screw (a karmic trial transcript), The Inspector 8 Caper (a red herring mystery), & Midnight Drums (with dueling solos).
Max ran for Mayor as a Bull Mu, part of the Bull Mu’s Stampede, a revolutionary reform movement based on an unlikely coalition of Bull Mooses, Bull Shippers, & Koan Masters. In one flashy coup, Max broke new ground in the territory of political advertising by painting florescent “Mu’s” on the rented sides of assorted Guernseys, Holsteins, Anguses, Short-hairs, Longhorns, as well as taxis, trains & busses, tunnels & bridges, his way of “lighting the night.”
** Bull Mu pictures soon also appeared on billboards, boosting not only his mayoralty, but his special promotions, most notably a Za Zen Zafu Mini Rodeo, which a Mirror-Times-Mirror’s reviewer described as “a Roach-rich gala of slam poets & slumming monks celebrating together for a good cause–to kick-start a High Cuckoo Society “Syllable counting/ Scholarship in Finger-based/ Verbal Accounting.”
~~~~The Verse Scholars’ Ship/
~~~money can buy–happiness/
~~~~~~~in warm pudding sinks
wrote Bodo, “pudding” being the nickname of endearment he called his zafu. One Honorable Haiku Scholar (HHS, PhD, MA, BS, DOA) claims the original sense was more like, “in warm pillow stinks,” & the verse about flatulence, a fact ignored by the Mad Ave Types (a noted image enhancement firm) who turned it into the following for a mattress & pillow emporium:
~~~~~ Verse Accountant says:/
~~~~~buy now–happiness mattress/
~~~~~~~~pillow refund, too!
The Verse Accountant surely did not trace any lineage to Bodo, but possibly to his “absent-minded student,” Kakadu Hikrapu, whose best known verse goes: squish between my toes/ sorry I didn’t wear shoes/ jamming that muffin,
having tried to kick a field goal with a fresh cow pie barefoot.
~~~~~Next time I’ll yell, Fore!/ before lofting my chip shot/ buffalo frisbee,
he added to snag a spot in the Bull Sheet’s Cuckoo Haiku Annual Prize Issue.
Master Bodo was not amused, & not a Bull Sheet fan, either, nor of Kakadu’s. He said, “Don’t call me Kakadu’s teacher. I never taught him nothing. He never learned a single thing, beyond his huff & puffing.”
~~~“I am not a fan/ of Kaka’s spew & sputter/– yet I also turn,”
he said once, standing, turning & leaving, surprising everyone, since they were at his house.
They found him again later at the library’s Pom Pom & Origami Club, hosting a program called, “Holdem & Foldem,” in which he turned a fluttering fan into a high-rising crane in a wink. Asked what he thought of Hikrapu’s verse-making, Bozo said,
~~~~~“bad haiku with tears/
~~~~makes wet confetti, happy/
~~~~~~~~to flutter away,”
upon which he & his crane followed suit.
~~~“I fold, my crane folds/
~~~we all fold-de-rol-rol roll/
~~~~~~~~pom-pomming along.“
& this before piano rolls, TP rolls, even rock-&-roll. But not before cycles, wagons, & wheelbarrows, jelly rolls & (oldest of all) belly rolls. “Not even Jelly Roll Morton Salt could improve on Belly Roll Jazz,” wrote jazz critic Lenny Bruce Feather.
“Know how to holdem, know when to foldem”
gave way to “know with whom to holdem,
know how to unfoldem…” ]
“I’ll see your royal flush, Duchess, & raise you a princess pool….”
–Origami Poker, as described in Card Catalog Scatology
{Roll credits….}
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Vaudeville’s “Leave’m wanting more” works for libraries also, which should always hold more than you could get to on that visit. Not even the most voracious reader ready to party after a long, slow fast can digest all that nature & culture have packaged here in one stuffing. It’s a big, varied world, after all, inside & out, upside & down, any way you/we slice it.
Your satisfaction time after time fulfills our mission, our reason for being, & original motivation–though, let’s face it, we serve ourselves first, if only to make sure you’re getting the service, quality, & variety of food-groups free of the contamination you deserve, along with an occasional rude surprise, loud guffaw with wet air spray.
We eat our own cooking, in other words–& laugh at our own jokes, that being usually our only reward. If we aren’t laughing, we’re not getting paid! Our standards must remain as low as possible, therefore, in keeping with the Limbo philosophy of keeping the bar low enough to jump over–laughing easily, in other words, even if that means by mistake using higher standards.
When the result is not as funny as it seemed in the first blush, there’s a chance we’ll notice that when we eventually come back to read passages as if we’ve never seen them before, easy to do thanks to a short attention span. It may take us awhile to get back, however, being easily distracted by other writing that also needs re-writing. As soon as re-reading (or visitor comment) alerts us that something doesn’t smell right, we try to clean it up, &/or throw it out. The job of cleaning up is never done–like the job of wising up.
Along these lines, providing satisfaction does not necessarily mean achieving &/or providing wisdom, however much we may try. For general purposes providing pleasure will usually do quite nicely, thanks, along with various other kinds of pleasing. Pleasing does seem to please us most, starting with ourselves. Wisdom may be pleasing, but how would we know? Socrates’ recipe for hemlock malted may serve as a reminder that being too much of a wise-guy can also displease others. (If you’re one of those, we apologize in advance, even if you’re the one who should.)
A wiser counsel might well advise, “You can’t please everyone.” That may well be, but from our perspective, a more relevant question is if we can please anyone–& if so, who & how? Here we might note that the complete satisfaction we guarantee does not require pleasing any more than it did wisdom. In fact, according to our attorneys, wisdom might make pleasing harder, and pleasing could delay satisfaction. We quote from their opinion:
“No sane person assumes that the satisfaction promised means now & for all time in all realms & domains. Just as all you can eat is limited to at one sitting, even complete satisfaction is universally limited to the goods or services in question over a reasonable period of time & pattern of use. In the case of things involving taste and other intangibles like knowledge, understanding, wisdom or entertainment, there are few objective criteria beyond personal judgement.
“In our experience, there is one such sign that is widely, if not universally, accepted as a sign of satisfaction, however, namely when the consumer of a product or service says, enough, or enough already–I’ve had enough! Sometimes this can be phrased I’ve had more than enough! I’ve had all I can take! or even, Stop–I can’t take any more. All visitors to the Bod L-O-L’s Annex for Humor & Media who stop when they’ve had enough may therefore be deemed ‘satisfied,’ anhd the guarantee met.”
~~~~~Shine, Bloom & Moonem, attorneys-in-law for-the-moment, specialists in ad hock & ad hominy arguments, along with de facto cases involving habeus corpses & the statues of limitation determining their expiration dates.
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beyond satisfaction–beauty, funny, utility
Unlike wisdom, which is sometimes a downer, beauty is almost always enjoyed & enjoyable in its own right, welcome even when it teases, fails to satisfy, or leaves you wanting more. If something is beautiful, it needs no other justification for being. It brings pleasure to hedonists & shedonists alike.
In this regard, beauty is like funny, which need not be wise, smart or make sense to be enjoyed, appreciated, and even useful. It may sometimes be hard to pin down the usefulness of beauty, as the beauty itself can be lost in the pinning. It’s sometimes said that even humor is lost when we try to pin it down, but this actually depends on whether the wriggling is funny or sad from the observer’s point of view.
Some scientists obsessed with human sexuality claim that what their subjects find beautiful corresponds with the signs & symptoms of genetic fitness & successful reproductive potential, the chemical constituents of which they are busily trying to identify & replicate in the lab. But this does not explain our experience in finding members of other, quite distant species beautiful, or the beauty of a landscape, a building, or idea.
Of course there are many books written trying to analyze what’s funny in humor, though many mainly just beat around the bush (“the bush, the bush, the beautiful bush/ the more you look, the more you push/ the more you push, the more you rush/ the more you rush the more you blush” —Wapu–the beautiful bush down under).
The utility of funny is far easier to explain than the nature of it, however, and probably easier than explaining the utility of beauty–which is otherwise quite as easy to experience directly as the utility of funny. Neither the laughter at funny nor the ahhh! at beauty require understanding to be effective, i.e., either pleasing or useful (usually both).
To beauty, pleasure, & funny, any full service L-O-L provider wants to be useful, i.e., deliver the prospect of some value-added in ability, power, strength, &/or functional know-how that helps accomplish, do or achieve something worthwhile.
Some might call increased utility an aspect of wisdom, a by-product of knowing, but let’s not nit-pick. Utility can just as easily be considered an aspect of beauty, e.g., Helen’s power to launch a thousand ships, Aphrodite’s ability to hawk a thousand nighties, the planetarium’s ability to fill a thousand seats nightly.
The value of beauty transcends its bottom line. “Beauty is more directly functional than truth, more lasting than pleasure, more useful than utility,” one redundant poet claimed, “grappling with knots of confused form.” (Fortunately, his work & name are now forgotten.)
Nevertheless, there was a point there, in that each shining virtue reflects the faces of its cousins, however crudely at times, as when reversing their directions in a mirror. We may find wisdom observing the ugly, cruel, wasteful, & ignorant for what they are, without window dressing, in other words, & beauty in nuts, nourishment in pleasure, and healing in laughter, as well as vice versa. Lots of vice versa.
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the value of the unknown
It’s been said, “you don’t miss what you’ve never known,” but do we really know that, or really not know? What if we need not know what we’re missing to feel that we’re missing, as in the old folk refrain, “I’m missing now, but I won’t be missing long”?
The idea of the unknown has driven scientific inquiry, research, observation & experiment from the beginning. All discovery depends on it–& has always depended on it. Hardly anything is known without it–or knowable. The discovery of “the unknown” may be considered one of the major milestones in the evolution of life & mind, representing a new birth for the reflective self, the origin of the inquiring I.
The nature of the unknown has not only changed over the eons, but continues to be constantly changing, at what may always look like an escalating rate. Where yesterday’s astronomer saw essentially nothing, today’s sees the existence of dark matter & dark energy, i.e., completely unknown kinds of matter & energy making up most of the unknown universe. As Albert Mimestein reportedly asked Steven Squawking, “Don’t you think it a bit strange that most of the known universe is made up of what’s unknown?”
Here at the Bod L-O-L, we have our virtual hands full missing what we’ve already forgotten, to worry much about the unknowns we have yet to discover–personal decrepitude & departure aside. As far as we’re concerned, then, it remains to be proven, or disproven, whether you miss what you’ve never known unless you can identify what it is.
It’s hard to test, in other words, even with the double-blind blindfolds now available. Fortunately, testing is something PIPA members know a crapload about. [Note on the fly: Otto Ed just tried to change crapload to crippled, but we fought back–& again in these brackets! What a world. We haven’t been counting, but we’d guess that, at least in our case, far more often than Otto Ed fixes typos, he/she/it introduces new mistakes by mis-correcting what was meant as given.]
As a result, we’ve already opened a Testing Room, where, among other things, you can test your taste against everyone else’s. Eventually, you’ll find pre-tests, post-tests, post-hole tests, sense tests, & lack of sense tests, as well as comprehensive incomprehension aptitude, achievement, & lack of attention assessment batteries; Idioms for Morons; tongue-twisting mime-audio twitter-free testes tests; & even perhaps whine tastings.
If there’s anything more useful than a good test (besides a good love, a good laugh, a good meal & a good crap) we don’t know what it is.*
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* It’s sometimes said, “Nothing is more effective,” but in head to head comparisons, most people find “laughing” more effective than testing & nothing put together. Scientists at the Rosy View Institute say that laughter may rival the best placebos in effectiveness, and as everyone knows, placebos almost always out-perform nothing, in addition to their pharmacological competition.**
** Whether aimed at attitude adjustment directly between the eyes or seeking it indirectly, as by-product of peripheral intelligence, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better partner in your healing efforts than partner with Placebo Pharma.***
*** Speaking of hard-pressings, we hear that the latest batches of Alice’s Inn Cider are simply “out of this world!” –Footnote Advertising
“A juglette a day keeps the undertaker away.” –Alice’s Inn Cider (Hard, Soft or Mushy)
“Free jugs & cheap buckets for wake-holders & cremation recipients.” –Ashtag Mortuary & Get Over It Funeral Parlor (“where happy hour never runs out of clock”).
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[Whew! Worn out. Many chapters have gone by to here. Chapters following, below, haven’t even been read over once yet, & we advise you to keep it that way until we get back….
If you do fare forward, be sure to start fresh, carry plenty of water, and stop to rest while doubled over. Go, or not, at your own risk, of course.]
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Mission-Method-Means: service—endless resonance—inkless pixels…
The mission, method & madness of a “library” seems easier to sum up than the multiple missions, purposes, methods, means, & particulars of all it contains, including its books, papers, films, tapes, microfiche, artworks, bottle collections, meeting-rooms, lavatories, cubicles, niches, herb gardens, card catalogs, slot machines, self-reference mirrors, funhouse mazes, “pool tables & electric chairs” (a traveling display), virtual students, scholar avatars, & imaginary staff….
It is to contain these, & make them accessible to those interested, whether they be browsers, adventurers, seekers or disoriented stumblers caught in the act of discovering the surprising pleasure of the astoundingly absurd.
Who are we to say whether what’s contained be wise, beautiful, goofy, nuts, inexpressibly profound, &/or in the eye-nose-ear-&/or-throat of the beholder? Presumably, if the Bod L-O-L is at all like other libraries, there’s some of each, & up to you to choose, with imaginary librarians-on-locoweed standing by to assist where necessary.
To qualify for admission to the Bod L-O-L’s Annex for Humor & Media, content should be:
—–laughable,
—–relating to media,
—–coming from a member of the Peninsula Independent Press Association;
—–appear in The Mirror-Times-Mirror, or some other organ with or without margins;
—–walking in to look & read of your own volition.
We reserve the right to serve no slaves, zombies, nay-nays or no-sayers
Whether serving you tennis balls at blinding speed, luau in bed at Alice’s Oahu Inn, or a subpoena to appear before Judge Knott (in the case of the People v. Hangem High), The M T Mirror-Times-Mirror.net reports on the world as it sees, hears, smells, thinks, ruminates, reconsiders, imagines, refracts, re views previews, revises reviews, &, finally, retracts.
Its creative staff of imaginary reporters, editors, researchers, footnote, copywriters, & ad bookers (some of whom may also take bets on the side) remain mindful of the fact that they & The Mirror-Times-Mirror participate in the worlds observed, described & interpreted; debunked, debriefed & defaced; represented, misinterpreted & reconsidered; advertised & represented in community features. The final step–retraction–rests on the help of irate readers moonlighting as media critics getting staff to read its scraps as if for the first time.
“That writer is a fool who has him- (or her) self as editor publisher, reader, subscriber, advertiser, critic, judge, jury & executioner,” said one such fool. “If that goes without saying, it also goes without –pants; –mask; –repeating; –multiple choice; –non sequiturs,” added the Lack of Incomprehension Testing Department.
By tomorrow (or next edition, whichever comes first), the world will have moved on, in any case, with & without us, pants, & sequiturs or not, even if not quite in ways or directions we might have preferred &/or predicted. The world we cover isn’t static, & neither are we–except for our radio broadcasts during lightning storms. [KNUMb keeps a supply of Emergency Broadcast Interruption Signs on hand for such surprises, as well as a direct underground light-cable connection to Peninsula Emergency’s Radio Mime for periods when fried audio transmitters go completely on the fritz.]
If yesterday’s news is “old hat,” at least old hats are sometimes the best kind, well broken in, sometimes even more than the odd old heads wearing them. Circuit-breaking & entering aside, the process of breaking a story often brings up sausage making as well as haberdashery. Today’s talking heads are often asked to put hats on sausages, though some distinguished journalists still value their time more highly than their images as pitchmen (& women), when time is part of their beat (along with life, chance & fortune).
If reporting is, as claimed, the first fast-version of history, then history is the slow 2nd draft of journalism, always lagging the events, and may include notes filed in the reporter’s “archives” or in what papers calls their “morgues.”
Not that the morgue’s the end of the story, at least at The M T Mirror, where the “Physics of Endless Resonance” kicks in. At the heart of mirror-times-mirror technology, the post-morgue PER (as physicists & feline-fanciers call the Physics of Endless Resonance & Repetition) makes our Review, Revise & Retraction process possible, keeping yesterday’s stories as fresh tomorrow as the day they were sent to the morgue, buried, burned & scattered. If & when they lose that freshness, we eventually notice, and when we can’t stand it any more, throw em out, or use them as gags when we tie up our readers.
It doesn’t take a doctorate in neurological economics to realize that something “not worth the paper it’s printed on” may represent a quite different value proposition without the costs of paper, ink & printing, thus radically lowering the cost of delivery without expensive packaging, or any packaging at all. With tangible costs approaching zero at the margins, the ability to add value through time potentially increases. Still, adding value is not a one-way street.
“The more we cut, the better we get.” –Editors Anonymous
Those interested in such things may find Pastures-Of-Plenty on our PEON page, where Pop’s Eye On News offers eyeball rolling exhibits on a rotating, revolving, & often revolting basis. Named for the Bod Library’s first founder, Pops Bods, publisher of The Mayan Daily Stella, the PEON page plans to feature the latest takes on timeless issues like spaceless thought transport & how media mistranslates events in transmission. Pops Bods had a hand, foot & eye in the freshly polished field of mistranslation in transmission, as outlined in An Invisible Life in Media (Transparent Press, “a TP Classic,” available by roll or sheet), his posthumous (some say post-humorous) autobiography, ghost-written under a pseudonym.
[This now hard-to-find work follows Pops Bod’s journey from student sports reporter to Wall Street Urinal intern; bullfight film extra & Spanish stage beard in Lope de Vega’s Malaga Trilogy to jazz radio news announcer & literary magazine advisor; people-to-people international correspondent in the Boonies to educational & market-simulation game designer on the far-kurt fringe; from scholarly journal reviewer & conference presenter in professional societies to free lance contributor of poetry, humorous fillers, articles, treasure hunts, wedding ceremonies, stage shticks, & radio extravaganza; from traveling presenter, speaker, & stage performer to amateur newsletter writer-editor-multiple-personality-ventriloquist-mime; from cradle to his high position as Bod Library’s Chief of Gravitational Field Janitorial Services, i.e., “dude in charge of this mess.”]
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——Drilling Down
The Mirror-Times-Mirror delivers light right to your eyeballs. We used to say, “Leave a crack open for us,” before our Circulation Dept. added Virtual Eyeball Technology. Now The Mirror management maintains a relatively “crack free” work environment.
Virtual Nose Technology is just over the horizon, we’re told. We’re not sure we’re sorry to miss it, truth be told. Who knows what Chemical Stink, Inc. will dish out, at what expense to organic sense?
Where “scratch’n sniff” is involved, we prefer the old fashioned, natural & organic. The same goes for “touch’n taste,” also quite lacking in digital domains, where digit-licking lags audio-visual realms by many generations. A foggy image or squishy audio leave one wanting better, but bad taste & smelly chemical substitutes can make you seriously sick, even if some call them smart (as in the iSmel, iStink & other pocket devices with an explosive portfolio of hydrogen sulfides & rotten eggs). Where taste, smell & illusions of touch are involved, only our WHRB Wireless Home Radio-Brain (the Wholly Riki-Bod network) delivers, truth be told.
As for the phrase, “truth be told,” why wouldn’t it be? Saying Truth be told doesn’t necessarily make it so, we admit. Some publications tell it like it was & some like it wasn’t, some with slant & some with spin, some with slop in garbage bin. We do our best & our worst, therefore, to counter each slant with a contrary twist, complementing each extreme with its counterpart, each contrarian opinion with its anti-contrarian corollary, each inconsistent position with its self-contradiction. If we’re not telling it like it is, we’re trying to tell it like it should be. Otherwise, we tell you “We’re not,” as here.
The same may be said for timeless truths like “As above so below,” which on reflection may also be phrased, “As below, so above.” The point is, if there were one, you would not know which was which from most conventional sources, which generally avoid worlds above & below, as well as those at diagonals, tangents, &/or must be shelled to get at the nuts, peas or yolks.
——————–UPPER——————-
——————–LOWER——————
——————–LESSER UPPER——–
——————–LOWER LOWER————
——————–LOWER OUTER———-
———–The Mirror Times Mirror Building
————Mirror-Times-Mirror Square
————————-Big Fork——————-
In our case, The Mirror Times Mirror Building is located at the heart of Mirror-Times-Mirror Plaza-Square, smack in the crotch of the Big Fork where countless roads converge in beautiful downtown Periphery Center. According to tradition, folklore & legend, one branch of the original fork goes to the place of truth-tellers (at one time a university without walls, built where nature had been the great teacher, with students at both ends of its log bench) while the other went to government & corporate offices, political & public relations headquarters, advertising & lobbying firms, promotional organizations, and the like.
The original fork (as distinct from the public roadways which slant across streets & avenues but not through buildings) cuts through what is now the Mirror-Times-Mirror Building, winds & coils through its core, & branches, one direction to the Short Attention Span Bridge, another to the Love Tunnel. Some observers think the main job of M- T- Mirror journalists housed in the crotch of that fork is to sniff out which path is which to separate truth from distortion, fact from fiction, fiction from fraction, fraction from faction, & factions from their actions, as if that were possible.
Nevertheless, we do our best to distinguish genuine truth-tellers from mere triers, and both of these from those tactical packagers who sometimes tell the truth, incidentally, but only when it happens to serve their interests. 
M T Mirror reporters have one primary assignment: cover everything surprising/ beautiful/ useful/ &/or funny in the entire universe, but leave the boring parts out….
It’s up to you to decide how well we succeed. Website delivery now includes free non-delivery at the same low price–currently $0, with “none cheaper, as low as it gets without we pay for your eyeballs” on its masthead. (Our news division has a more or less firm policy of not paying for eyeballs, “unless there’s a compelling reason to contradict our better judgment.”)
In a small shop operation like ours, the same person may switch hats–editor’s one moment, ad manager’s the next, then bill collector, bill payer, janitor next. If there’s anything left over, we may play news staffer, in-house critic, reviewer, & circulation director, then personnel trainer, independent auditor, upper management consultant & basement intern, all encouraged to work together for the common good, the good of stockholders, stakeholders, & the whole Dang Peninsula, even the planet, the galaxy, the best possible universe available to us at the moment….
I laughed so hard I wet my pants
would be music to our ears.
I laughed so hard, I had to dance
could to my eyes bring tears.
We’d be astounded you got so far,
with doo-doo deep & thick as tar,
with standards so low & irregular,
they moonlight at the Limbo Bar.
A bar that goes no lower
without a trap door in the floor.
Down the hatch & out the core
to the country of No More, No Moor!
PS: Yours Crudely knows this is:
a) too much; b)bull; c) completely ridiculous;
d) deeper than all but the most dedicated spelunker may ever want to plunge;
e) excessive, extra, etc.; f) free fall folly;
g) a poor substitute for Gigi’s G-Spot (an ad for which to follow);
h) neither rhyme nor reason….
[Although some places have rhyme without reason, & others reason with no rhyme, most have neither. If you’ve laughed at all, however, perhaps the reason’s been fulfilled. If Yours Crudely has laughed while writing, or more likely re-writing, then all the better. That was reason enough. The rest is gravy.]
“The first reason of the Creator was to laugh.”
——————Saying of the Salami Clan
“If you wanna be happy, listen to the music.
If you wanna be sad, listen to the words.”
~~~~~~~~~~Country Music Adage
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Lookout below–Scenic Vista: you are here,
(Look up or down at your own risk.)
We are proud to be part of the National Deconstruction,
Daily Re-vitalization & Bowel Movement….
[to be continued…] [Oh, no, oh, no…]
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NO BOTTOM IN SIGHT: We still need to give our No News Magazine linkers a room their own–[to follow]…
You can contact Bod Library, Mirror-Times-Mirror, &/or Yours Crudely by leaving a comment in the blank below–or by email c/o YoursCrudely@gmail.com.