Beckhampalooza!

We interrupt Poetry Week here at The Dictionary of Unfortunate Ideas to write some more about that most vital of issues: The Spice Girls.

No, actually I meant Football, or as it's known here in the States: Soccer. Actually, since this is about Posh Spice's husband, we can combine the two. The Spice Girls and Football, not Soccer and Football, as they're the same thing. Anyway...

It's been a few months now since David Beckham's triumphant arrival in the United States and one bad ankle and knee injury later it's been a mixed bag. On the one hand, people who didn't know a football from a bong are attending footy matches in the U.S. Celebrites are bonkers over Beckham and even regular American sportswriters, who tend to view proper football as something akin to brain-sucking, mutant aliens taking liberties with their grandmothers are covering the game, if only to loudly pronounce beween fried chicken tender-scented belches that Beckham will never make football popular in America. This is usually followed by excessive belt-tightening.

The poor gits don't realise that football is the second-most played youth sport behind basketball, and this is only because basketball is played in the frozen dead of winter, where its only competition is expensive and violent ice hockey games and eyes-glazing-over curling matches. It's already a popular sport to play. Watching it is simply the next bleeding step. Beckham will only help accelerate the inevitable addiction to football that many of us have already succumbed to.

Obviously, Beckham does have the celebrity thing working for him. Yes, he's a very talented player, even if he is in the autumn of his career. However, it's his dashing metrosexual, "Posh is my gorgeous-if plastic-flatmate," who knows what daft hairstyle I'm on about this week, celebrity power that make his presence in MLS a massive media draw. He seems to make it all work and appears to be a very modest, self-effacing bloke despite the gazillion flash bulbs going off in his face, and having more knickers hurled at him than Tom Jones at Woodstock (had he been there and had most of the participants been wearing underwear).

Of course, the celebrity aspects could backfire as well. As Becks and Posh are friends with Tom Cruise, there is the suspicion that Becks may be affiliated with Scientology. If Becks turns up in the locker room one afternoon with an "e-meter" and warning his playing mates about the negative effects of Thetans on getting the ball wide, it will all go pear-shaped very quickly.

Because of injuries, this season will be a star-studded wash (and that's just the after-game parties). The real test is whether Beckhampalooza continues in March when MLS starts their new season. If the fans continue turn out in force to see Mr. B., the love-fest with footy could just be getting underway, and you know what that means:

Victory 2, starring Tom Cruise and Ronaldinho!

We now return you to the Marcel Marceau retrospective: "Silent, but Deadly."

Nuffy Noe is the Terrible Poet

I did not sign onto this blog to get into verbal communcation wars with somebody what was a "Late Comer" to the Dictionary, and a guru of phony "Five Times Better" snake oil cult promotions, and a person what is terrible at the poetry. Nuffy Noe, your, how you going to say, eulogy poem to Marcel Marceau was a nauseating disgrace to the written word and to the memory of the so many poets what lived and write the poems down through the centuries. You are not the good poet. You are not even the bad poet. You are the so awful poet that your poem is like an old ball of deviled ham rolled around in an elephant's diarrhea and buried in the earth for seven month, then dug up, spat on by three very flu-laden chimpanzees and finally force fed to a starving lamb. Yes, it was that ruinous and terrible, what you writed. Marcel Marceau, the King of all White Paint Faces Persons, had his memory disgraced, sickened, schmozzened and disturbed, and his honor smothered in cow tongue scrapings by your hideous wreckage of a poem.

I trust all of our three dozen readers of this blog will agree.

Consequently, I propose a Poem Off. We shall see, Mrs. Not Five Times Any Good At All, who is the, how you can say, bester poet among all the scribes of the Dictionary of the Ideas Which Are Unfortunate. I draw the first blood! The topic of our poems shall be: Ostrich Egg


The Egg That Break the Sky
by Jorge Carlito Viejo

How come the egg, which is the smallest of all the earth's shell-encased yolk objects,
Can hatch ideas and give birth to visions of blubbery round stomachs,
Like maggots birthed from the corpse of my childhood. Why is this so?
How can it be that the cracking of that white, hairy shell of the egg
Can look like long vertical bars to me, enshelling my body for three years?
How come it is that a short, short and squatty egg can walk the earth, free as a summoned idea,
When we all know he deserve some kind of terrible beating about the face and personality
With a hammer not made of metal or wood or salad or bullet, NO,
but a hammer made of justice, compassion, words, vomited statements and interjections,
That gush from the gaping maw of all truly free beings like milk-thick throat water?
Someday, the written words and the spoken words will have relations with each other,
The way we learned about relations being had in junior high Health Class,
and the mewling, damp infant they give birth to will be called Truth,
and he will never shut up! He will howl the Truth late into the darkest minutes of the night,
the truth about a man who resembles an Ostrich Egg and who has the secret name,
the name that is like vinegar dripping through crushed velvet--Devito, Devito, Devito.


end

Top that, Five Times Smellier!

Jorge and His Unending Weirdly-Accented Disgrace

Jorge, I've just about had enough of your less-than-Five-Times-better way of speaking and commemorating the dead. You pretend to write a nice eulogy for Marcel Marceau but then it devolves into a rambling tone poem about how he gave children nightmares and you're basically glad he's gone because now you can sleep in peace. You're a sick, sick man, Jorge (if that IS your real name). Jorge and Linus are two forces of questionable moral purpose on this blog. Fortunately, one of them (Jorge) has been in prison for a swimming pool incident with Danny Devito so he hasn't posted often, and the other (Linus) has dropped off the face of the earth like a soft boiled egg Elmer's glued to a brick and thrown through an open gateway into the Land of the Lost.

Well, look, I know I've been gone for a while. I had places to go, people to see, things to do, betternesses to achieve and Mark Northovers to grieve. But I'm back, so zip up and listen. Here is the real, true and appropriate tribute to the former King of All Mimes, Marcel Marceau, who recently abandoned this earth like ethnicity abandoning the face of Michael Jackson.

The Five Times More Respectful Tribute to Marcel Marceau

by Nuffy Noe

Marcel, the wind blew you around the stage and right into my heart,

Deep down into the emotional cortex of my fondest part,

You pulled invisible ropes out of my mind and freed my dreams,

And now I can be anything I want, even a supernuclear space horse, it seems.

You made all things possible, and did so without a single spoken word,

With mere gestures, you set joy free, like a cotton candy-colored bird.

Formerly, I did not know what it meant to live the dream and dream the life,

But you showed me the portal to both, to a silver-shimmering city without strife.

You climbed unseen ladders and pushed unknowable objects, like angels moving the sun,

You were the one, Marcel, you were the one, yes, you were the one,

And when you made your noiseless flatulence, it burst out like starbeams into the sky,

A rainbow of sparkling moon stinks from your pants, it sparkled so high.

Unforgettable Marcel, the King of all Mimes, why did you have to leave?

You can't be gone, not silent old Mime Lord. This I shall not believe.

I choose to believe that you have faked your death, silently faking your end,

And that you lurk in the forest now--to bears and acorns and feral children, the eternal friend.

end.

Quiet Person Goes Quietly into the Quiet Night

Maybe you have heard from the news sources that the quietest man who ever lived has quietly passed away from a quiet ailment of some kind. He was none other than Lord Farthingworth Gagnon, but his name of performing which by you might know him was Marcel Marceau. Now, some of you will read this and trumpet, "NO, you stupid foreign man Jorge Carlito, I do not accept from the likes of YOU that Marcel Marceau has quietly extinguished his noiseless candle." I know, I know, my beautiful fellow humanity, it is difficult to accept that one with such a painted white scary mime face but so big a gushing heart of love for the ladies and such a compassionate soul of the French persuasion could be gone from this earth like a balloon full of mustard sinking into the Marianas Trench. But he's gone.

Listen to me, dear ones, he is gone. Why him and not the ostrich egg man named Danny Devito? I do know not. It defies the logic that a tiny rotund sphere of an egg man who landed me in prison for the harassment could not be heavenward but Marcel of the white paint face and creepy eyes could be, but that is the way of it. I do not resent Danny his continuing life, however. In my deepest heart, I still want to smear butter all over the face of him and duct tape little bits of zebra hide to his shiny orb head.

But this not the post for talking about the ostrich egg of Danny. No, this is about creepy heart gush french kind person Marcel Marceau, and here is the poem I write in his honor and memory. Rest in peace, Oh Quietest Man of All.


Marcel and the Quietest Moment in History
by Jorge Carlito Viejo

He have the face like a plastic paint can, with no hope in its marble eyes,
A colorless face of cloud hue where dwell quietest hissing skull birds.
Why did Marcel shun verbal communication?
Why did he make children scream when he leers from the shadows with no words?
How could anyone not be terrified of the painted white horror mime mask?
I pee a little bit to look at him, because mime faces make good people sick.
Nevertheless, I love you, Marcel, the way a grandpa loves a pimento cheese sandwich,
And I want to miss you more than I do, but the white paint face in the corner,
It finally vanished, leaving my dreams in noise not bone cracking utter silence.
Oh quiet man, so quiet before, even the most quiet now, paint can white face,
Marble eyes, we salute you.