Thursday, April 25, 2013

Give my you snausages money or I will give you a fur wedgie!

I couldn't decide if this should be a bullying post or a same sex marriage post.

Of course at the TOP they are one and the same.

Hee.

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13 comments:

Chip S. said...

Maybe it's a terrierism post.

April 25, 2013 at 3:44 PM
ndspinelli said...

LOL, ChipS! Your puns I usually understand. Bruce is too cerebral and obscure most of the time for me.

April 25, 2013 at 5:37 PM
Chip S. said...

Yes, he operates on a higher plane. Probably drinks absinthe he makes in his lab, while you and I are washing down shots of Bushmill's with swigs of Old Style.

April 25, 2013 at 5:49 PM
MamaM said...

Swings not swigs
For the Chirbit King

Now if you huff and puff
And you finally show enough
Malevolence and mood to trip the chirbit switch
Take a tip, before you make the trip
To where I'm telling you to go.
Go to England, Oh!

April 25, 2013 at 6:43 PM
chickelit said...

@MamaM: Problem is that Inga loves it and finds it flattering.

My personal fave was the "Cedarford channels WS Burroughs" chirbit. I have a tendency to laugh too hard at my own jokes, though.

April 25, 2013 at 7:44 PM
chickelit said...

Chip S. said...
Yes, he operates on a higher plane. Probably drinks absinthe he makes in his lab, while you and I are washing down shots of Bushmill's with swigs of Old Style.

Three flavors make me wretch. The first is cheap brandy because of a near fatal drinking experience in high school. I can still handle cognac. The second is fennel which the Italians call finocchio. I don't know why but it does. The third is absinthe. The story behind that one is that when I was kid, I had an uncle who had a fabulous loft in downtown Chicago. He also had a hot French wife. One time, it must have been when I was 8 (in '68), we went down there for a visit. The hot wife was serving absinthe which she brought back from Paris. She had us taste it too and I almost threw up.

April 25, 2013 at 7:55 PM
Evi L. Bloggerlady said...

Talking about sausages...did those Anthony Weiner missing pics pop up?

April 25, 2013 at 8:52 PM
MamaM said...

Problem is that Inga loves it and finds it flattering.

The real fun is in doing it and hitting the mark. I began laughing when the music started, and more so when your cheerful singing voice trumped even the words.

April 26, 2013 at 2:11 AM
MamaM said...

Chickelit: This story is a hard one for me to read but it reminds me of the you, and the blog father.

“Istvan was a Hungarian Gypsy, nicknamed Rudolph Valentino. He had jet-black eyebrows, more sharply defined than if they’d been painted on. We shared a bunk in a fraternal way, as well as a lot of fat lice that commuted between his rags and mine in a continuous stream of rush hour traffic. He spoke in a lilting dialect, most of which I couldn’t understand. Even the few words of German he had picked up from the SS sounded melodious in his mouth. .

“Although he wasn’t a member of the camp orchestra, he owned a fiddle, and would play many a czardas for us in the evening. The block leader loved to listen and would reward him with a piece of bread or some leftover soup, half of which Istvan always passed on to me. If a violin string broke during one of his performances, he’d pull a handful of brand new ones out of his pocket, cool as a cucumber. He was amazing, he could steal an egg out of a hen’s backside before she even knew she was going to lay.

“He could swipe the most outlandish things, from blue suede shoes to real caraway cheese. Once he even pinched a compass for us to use during our escape. Because escape we surely would, in a week or a month , no doubt, according to Istvan. I would nod in agreement, but only half heartedly. Escape was as good as impossible. Whoever tried it usually didn’t get very far. The dogs would pick up his scent and when he was returned to the camp he’d be strung up. Sometimes, as a little joke, the SS would dump the fugitive’s corpse onto a chair and hang a notice around his neck reading BACK AGAIN! I’d been a prisoner long enough to know the chances of survival on the other side of the barbed wire were not much greater than they were inside. Istvan didn’t know that, or didn’t want to know. Every night he sat bent over the compass like a child, seeing in it not just the cardinal points but the whole wide world: forests, mountains, rivers. Even the stars and planets were mirrored in his dark eyes.

“At the time my Arbeitskommando had the job of unloading stones. It worked like this. One of the prisoners would stand on a truck and throw the stones at top speed to another prisoner standing below, who would catch them and pass them on to the next in line. The catcher at the bottom of the truck had the worst of it, and at night his hands were as raw as fresh steak. Willi Hammer, with his peculiar sense of humor, made me the catcher time after time, until every nerve in my fingers was exposed and small cauliflower-shaped swellings began growing from the bone.

Other catchers got that too. Skozepa, a Czech, went to the hospital block with it. When he came back, he had no more swellings but not more fingers, either: They’d been cut off with a pair of rubber cutters. Before he was gassed, we fed him bread with a finger-thick layer of beet-root jam on it, something nobody begrudged him.

A few days later, a beaming Istvan pushed small bundle toward me that turned out to contain a tube of sulfur ointment, some clean rags, and a large safety pin. The safety pin was my salvation: I held it in the fire, tore my festering fingers open from top to bottom and dislodged the cauliflowers one by one.”

My father places his hands palm up on the table. We know those thin scars pointing like arrows to the scar tissue on his fingertips, but we look all the same.

April 26, 2013 at 2:18 AM
MamaM said...

“Istvan,” he says, “Istvan.” He shakes his head slowly. “I don’t know what got into him all of a sudden. He abandoned all hope of escaping. He stopped making music. Night after night he sat in a corner of the barracks staring in front of him. ‘I can see no end to it,’ he would say dejectedly. “no end, no end.’

“He became reckless, would march out of step, and stole like a magpie. He wouldn’t get up on his own in the morning and had to be clubbed out of his bunk. One morning the inevitable happened.

“I can still remember as if it were yesterday. We were lined up, by blocks, on the snowy assembly ground, standing at attention and ready for inspection by the SS. As soon as the guards showed up, we were supposed to salute them by turning our heads in their direction and removing our caps. The problem was that they always approached from the rear, and we, standing there looking straight ahead, couldn’t tell which side they were coming from. To keep mistakes to a minimum, the block leader, who could see them coming, had thought up a little ruse. If the SS came from the left he would give the order ‘Caps off!’ If they came from the right, he would just shout ’Caps!’ This ploy save us from a lot of beatings and punishment drill.

“On this particular morning, Istvan was about six rows in front of me, standing rigidly in line like everyone else. We could hear the SS boots. ’Caps off! came the command.
In unison we looked over our left shoulders and bared our heads. Then there was an ominous silence. Thinking that some idiot had turned the wrong way, I glanced at the other rows out of the corner of my eye.”

In the course of telling this story, my father has risen to his feet. He is standing stiffly at attention beside his chair, an invisible cap in his right hand. Slowly he raises his hand and points with a finger at a spot in the room where we can see absolutely nothing . His face begins to glow.

“Just imagine,” he says, “those rows of prisoners, shaven heads as far as the eye could see. And right in the middle there stood Istvan with--and God alone knows where it had come from--a red tin toy car on the top of his bald head. The thing was held on with bits of string, violin strings probably, which ran from the little wheels down to Istvan’s chin, under which he had knotted the ends.

“It was the only time I was in the camp that I saw the SS speechless. Their surprise didn’t last very long, of course, a moment at the most, but a moment during which a single Untermensch just one ‘subhuman’, made a laughingstock of the whole Third Reich while standing stiff as a ramrod, not moving a muscle, until they dragged him out of the lines.

“Barely half an hour later he was strung up on the gallows before a large audience. We were ordered to march close up to his tortured body and to look at it for two whole minutes. The SS had removed the little red car, as if they were afraid we might go on laughing. “

from Bearing Witness; Nightfather by Carl Friedman,

April 26, 2013 at 2:18 AM
chickelit said...

Barely half an hour later he was strung up on the gallows before a large audience.

"Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
~Samuel Johnson

April 26, 2013 at 10:25 AM
windbag said...

MamaM, you took the smartass out of me with that. Nothing more to add to that.

April 26, 2013 at 10:55 AM
MamaM said...

Story Title: No End

April 26, 2013 at 12:45 PM

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