Toad

Brother Dub presented to me on this day this toad. Lo, I was mightily humbled. Yet another fine specimen of animal carcass to add to my collection! It's runoveredness makes it eminently scannable, and so I have.

Dub was particularly agog over the green fly in the crook of its right foreleg. He contends the insect was a last undigested meal. I contend it is the toad that was the last meal of the fly and that both were run over by separate cars. Any experts care to weigh in?

Mick Bowie

Weaned on American blues records, Mick's fledgling undertaking was lead singer for Brit bluesers, The Undertakers. On a bender he met Friar Tut, doomed acid-scarred waif and father-snorting corpse, Rich Keifer. Together with those other two weird guys, they formed the Burning Candles. The bad boy antithesis of goodboyism, the Candles burned at both ends and went out altogther with the mass arrest of the entire group for satanism in 1968.

Mick Bowie emerged from his incarceration a ch-changed man. Hiring new friends, he took the rock world by storm, first as Astro Turf, then as the Hydrogenous Kid, and if that wasn't enough, as Zippy Pinhead and the Piano Wires From Hell. He is known today as the father of Gland Rock and the multiple minions he spawned are collectively known as the Underlings.

From The Undertakers to the Underlings, Mick Bowie remains to this day a commodity to be reckoned with.

Small Price

"Oppression and harrassment are a small price to pay to live in the Land of the Free."

- C. Montgomery Burns

Hecate

Thracian Queen of Ghosts

Blue vs. Green

Those Byzantines. Soccer hadn't caught on yet, but chariot racing was big. Really big in Constantinople in the year 532 when the Blues yet again played the Greens. A year earlier a select group of Blue and Green fans were sentenced to be hanged for rioting or killing or whatever, only come the date, one of each side broke the ropes and took refuge in a church. A standoff ensued. Justinian, the emperor, a Blue Man himself, did what great leaders always do when faced with a crisis; he called for a sporting event.

The chariot racing crowd became a mob, Blues and Greens together demanding mercy for the condemned men. Never build your Hippodrome next door to your palace. The race turned into a siege and a pretty decent torching of the city that went on for the better part of a week. Senators arranged for a new emperor, what color I do not know. Justinian called in his big guns - or swords - under the command of Belisarius.


Take heed, soccer fans. Belisarius herded the rabble into the Hippodrome and mowed down as many as he could. About 30,000 died, or nearly half a Super Bowl. History forgets what became of the condemned Blue and Green. The emperor, however, remained in power and subsequent chariot races were tamer affairs.

Visage

A mile into the cave, steadily decending, the oxygen got thin and our torches dimmed. When we stood still, the silence was so complete it made our ears ring. The cave walls seemed to be drawing in towards us. From a darkened corner of what had to be the final turn-around room, I heard the sound of rock scraping against rock. Our lights fell upon a boulder and we saw it was moving, slowly turning. I was the first to focus and gasped accordingly. There on the rock, in the rock, of the rock, was a mummy. A brooding rock mummy whose slumber had been disturbed.

Hannibal Lecter

"I ate his liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone."

Mad Tapestry

What, Me Worry?

Pyranoa

Pyranoa has a habit of creeping up behind you and grasping your neck in his huge hands. You feel his fingertips find your jugular and start to squeeze. You reflexively draw a breath and then can no longer breathe. You struggle. He grips harder. You turn blue. He let's go, laughs heartily, slaps you on the back. walks away. You mutter a curse.