Something has to be done.

Attention all Westerners!

Haiku are not just the correct number of syllables! You also have to include a reference to the season.

For example, let’s take Basho:

In the cicada’s cry

No sign can foretell

How soon it must die.

There is a reference to summer there. Cicadas are summer pests! Not winter or spring or autumn. Summer!

Here’s one by Issa:

A sudden shower falls -

and naked I am riding

on a naked horse!

See? The rainy season! That nuance of Japanese weather takes place in about May.

Now examine a Western sampling from the Periodic Table of Haiku:

brittle alloy

corroded by salt

one hot pot

Salt-corroding can happen at any time! Salt-corroding is not bound by seasonal change!

This is what the Male Librarian Centrefold claims is a haiku:

japanese sento

gnarled bodies as pine trees

age — my destiny

Sure, Mr. Centrefold, you have references to the transience of life. But in what season are you bathing? Give us a reddening maple leaf or an errant snowflake or even a mislaid cherry blossom petal!

And the Erotic Haiku Collection has:

Pregnancy

Guessing the technique

Relatives smile

Come on! Humans mate in any season. Get some daffodils involved! Bring in Punxsutawney Pete! Mention that jack o’lantern voyeur! You have to pinpoint more than the lecherous grins your perverted family members are sporting.

Or else:

Back to your sonnets, soundrels!

I just noticed that, according to the wonders of Sitemeter, some Brazilian stumbled on my site while looking up “aunt spanking bad boys with leather slipper.” Now I can’t remember when I wrote about any aunts disciplining the rougher elements of manhood in that way, but I share Yahoo space with “DevilF**k.com — INTENSE MOTHER F**KING S**T!”

There is obviously some connection between motherhood and Satan. My best friend had banner ads promoting the two side by side. Having never experienced motherhood, I cannot give a balanced opinion in this regard.

I was #59 in this “aunt slipper-spanking” search, with this descriptive excerpt: “… Older teenage boys drove around the Colosseum making fun of the … Never squish them with a slipper. An egg might remain … I had a bad feeling. Don’t open your backpack …”

Recently someone else stumbled on my site while looking up “stereotypical caucasian dinner.” Of course, that would be the August entry where I described a stereotypical caucasian breakfast: nettle-and-moorfowl oatmeal, ground cardamom seeds with coffee ice cubes, and the ubiquitous bacon and tentacles.

Morning of February 29, 2004 dream:

This guy who snubbed me last November and I were walking. He was white. He picked up two East Asian ladies. The three of them walked ahead of me, laughing, while I followed silently from behind.

Some of the houses along the streets had high gates, as they do in Transylvanian villages.

In a covered courtyard, there was torpedo hanging from the ceiling. Someone ordered me to swing the torpedo into the television affixed to the opposite wall. On the television was a film about the sea.

They promised me the torpedo would not explode on contact. I set forth on my task.

I almost managed to swing the torpedo into the television. I decided to take a break. I wandered around the garden in the back.

When I returned to my task, one of the ladies was busy swinging the torpedo. The torpedo was very close to the television screen. “Hey, you’re going to steal my accolades! Give me that torpedo!” She pushed me away.

Suddenly, the snubber runs from the street into the courtyard. His sword slices through the woman’s shoulders as if they were tepid butter. He amputated both of her arms!

My shock was such that I immediately woke up. But, still half in my dream, I saw the poor woman, months later, watching the doctors place her newborn baby on her chest. Then I saw, still in my half-awake, half-asleep state, that both mother and baby would have to be spoonfed.

The dream dictionary reports: “the loss of entire arms [denotes] unusual depression in trade. Afflicted persons should be warned to watchfulness after this dream.”

Surrealist compliment of the day: Were giraffe’s antennae to sprout from your barnacled elbows, one could but weep for the pretense of a fallen chamber pot.

Any sentence that uses barnacle as an adjective is a good sentence.

Eve, after two years, has tracked me down again! Woo hoo! My elementary school best friend is back!

I should be doing a million other things. But I took a two-hour call from me best friend. O! the chortling about Deuce Bigalo & possum hunting & feathers! Then the weird Southern accents as we went into a half hour of making jokes about being Tennessee inbreds. She is even going to get me a special recording “How to Fake an Irish Accent.”

And she wrote a special posting, just for me, about cockroaches.

Plus, we gave each other new nicknames. She is Sonny (that’s short for Son). I am now Scrappy (because I only have scraps of paper instead of business cards).

Only ten more months until I can see her again…

“It turns out, for instance, that people will often consciously choose against their own happiness.”

A famous writer recounts his days as a sex slave.

Female sex slaves are pretty de rigueur. But when we hear about a white male sex slave in some part of Africa we can never expect to find on a world map, then we must click on this link. Mutual exploitation is right.

“The rule of juxtaposition, for example, explains that one ingredient will seem tasteless if it is served with another, more tasty ingredient. Conversely, the flavorful ingredient’s taste will be sharpened.”

Women have been applying molecular gastronomy to their lives for years. How do I know this? Because I am that tasteless ingredient – the pablum bath in which Toblerone pyramids wallow.

More scientifically, I have gathered data from my recent excursions and, plotting it on a graph, a pattern emerged. Three out of four girlfriend outings shows me to be the cracker that underlies the beluga caviar. My success, at the very least, is that I am sharpening the flavour of the flavourful ingredient: two out of the three ladies snagged a man.

The fourth girlfriend outing fell into the rule of dominance: “an ingredient with a dominant taste (a very sweet-tasting ingredient such as chocolate, for instance) must always be ‘awakened’ by an ingredient with another dominant taste (an acidic food, for example).” Though the truffle of the night gathered a whole gaggle of fellows about her, at the very least I had the attentions of a hook-nosed mathematician. I was that acidic orange complementing chocolate.

Future girlfriend outings will have me starring as one of the following ingredients in each pair:

Spice bread ice cream & crab syrup.

Smoked bacon & egg ice cream.

Oysters & passion-fruit jelly.

Tobacco-flavored ice cream & liquid nitrogen.

Sardines & sorbet toast.

For Charles:

Numerous

Errata

Carpet

Every

Satirical

Stageplay,

Although

Rarely

Yours.