Keeper of the Clown Bell

Don't you love farce? Did you honestly think the Keeper of the Clown Bell was going to let the death of Stephen Sondheim pass without comment? Not a chance of that happening but, as is customary in polite society, if you’ve got something unpleasant to say about someone who  just kicked the bucket then give it a week or two before hurling your insults. In the case of Sondheim I am understandably restrained in my pronouncements because his lyric “isn’t it rich?” has been a tagline of the KOTCB blog since 2004 so I owe him (as do we all) a debt for composing the Clown World anthem in that pivotal year of 1973. “ Send in the Clowns ” moaned forth from the Broadway stage in the  year of  the disposable lighter  and  Sleeper  prescience or, put another way, the waning of the  Evel era  when the celebrated master reinvented the American musical by adapting a 1950’s Scandinavian art house flick into “ A Little Night Music .” On that last point I should pause and declare that I am by temper

After the lunar eclipse Those of us living on planet earth experienced a powerful and transformative lunar eclipse on November 18/19 the likes of which  hasn't happened for almost 600 years  and  the effects of this cosmic revelation will be felt by all over the coming months and years . Hard headed (and hard hearted) pragmatists scoff at astrology as nothing more than spiritualist hokum to occupy the minds of flakes and line the pockets of flim-flam artists but not me - I take the music of the spheres very, very seriously. Astrology was first practiced  in Mesopotamian antiquity and then refined in Egypt & Greece by Hermes Trismegistus in which form it has been consulted and practiced by, what I consider to be, the most intelligent people to have ever lived. So when the Sun, Earth and Moon align and glorious light is blotted out causing massive shadows to be cast upon the silver disc in the sky I wake up and take notice.  "The good thing about eclipses is that generally y

Mr. White Chocolate Chas T. with some based EHS girls Yesterday was the annual celebration of The Game which, as long time readers of the KOTCB blog already know, is a very important heartbeat for our nation and critical to my peace of mind. The 2020 game was canceled due to Chinavirus panic so the defibrillation to get the world back to some kind of normalcy got another jolt on Saturday afternoon when the Maroon took the field against the Tigers in Orange VA for  the 120th gridiron battle  between the two storied schools with noble histories.  For nubes previous KOTCB blog posts on The Game can give you some context for what follows: 2015 -  What's is all about, Ali? 2018 -  Burn The Forest 2019 -  Glory in the flower In the AM I prepped for tailgating and was tightening my bow tie when my brothers sent me this talking head in a group chat: Mr. White Chocolate Chas T. : What crawled up his ass? MC Merdouche : They disinvited him to speak to Young Republicans at EHS. Earlyman : Not

My brother called me on election night (11/2) at 8:28 PM ET to ask if I was watching the results trickle in for the Virginia Governor's race? Answer: No,  I haven't watched Television for a year , I couldn't care less who wins and whoever wins will be the "winner" of a rigged election. He informed me that Fairfax County in NOVA had just reported tabulation errors and started a "rescanning" of ballots which I considered humorous news. I asked my brother if he had made a credit card purchase or cash withdrawal from an ATM over the past 12 hours (which he had) and then wondered how businesses and banks can account for millions/billions of transactions every day but the  3rd richest county in America  can't tally 436,783 ballots? If Visa or Mastercard ran the voting infrastructure of Virginia they could tabulate the totals on the fly and citizens could watch the returns come in on their smartphone app. There would be an encrypted  two-phase commit protoc

In the pantheon of television male archetypes there are, from season to season, but one or two standouts who personify the contemporary zeitgeist and claim a piece of mental territory that lives on long past the show’s final episode.  These characters which, at their inception, are pure thought contrived by writers and transcribed on parchment take on a living persona when a thespian applies his black arts of transmutation and “becomes” the modern demigod. By way of electricity and the cathode ray gun this model of manhood is projected (shot) into the minds of impressionable humans and form a template which, though impossible to match, serves as a target which aspiring strivers aim to achieve.  James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillion on “Gunsmoke” (20 year run from 1955-1975) is the prototypical example of this modern magic but over the decades there have been a fist full of other larger than life players who live in people’s memory as powerfully as a real-life favorite uncle or inspiring

Who voted for this guy? It's been ten days since the results of the Maricopa County, Arizona ballot audit were released to the public and presented at a hearing held by the state senate. This exercise in democratic accountability had been going on for months and, if reports are to be believed, was completed well over a  month before the September 24th hearing where   overwhelming proof of an illegitimate election was presented to lawmakers . The audit showed multiple irregularities, fake ballots, duplicate counts, errors, omissions and egregious acts of sabotage and obstinance by the Maricopa County board of supervisors who did everything they could to withhold and destroy evidence of wrongdoing from the citizen sleuths. The misfeasance of Arizona's political leaders was clearly defined, shocking and (for some) beyond belief but somehow these facts were discovered, organized, packaged and suppressed for MONTHS by the Cyber Ninjas who were attempting to "get to the bottom&q