THE JIG IS UP: Yes, Saddam, the spell you cast on Iraq is over; you know the climate of fear is gone when people who wouldnt say your name except to praise you in the most fulsome manner possible start laughing at you.

EXPANDING GOLF'S AUDIENCE: As you may know, a bolt of lightning struck nineteen golfers in Colorado recently, careening from man to man before finally disappearing into the earth. Now the uninformed reader may suspect that, while golf is not an inherently exciting game, using lightning to pique spectator interest may not be the best way to gain an audience. To begin with, lightning is not very dependable; one can hardly schedule thunderstorms to coincide with the Masters or the U. S. Open. And lightning is also unfair, subjecting taller players to greater risk than shorter players; the constant use of lightning in golf will lead inevitably to a game played only by dwarves, just as professional basketball today is a sport that can only really be played by the very tall (yes, I know; there are short guys in the NBA, but they are the exception, not the rule). Everyone is playing the same game so the risks should be the same for everyone.

How to achieve this? There are a few simple ways to increase golf’s interest factor. Australian saltwater crocodiles in the water obstacles are a good way to begin. Those things are huge and watching Vijay Singh running like hell to avoid getting eaten would certainly spark my interest in the game. One possible disadvantage, though: it would encourage Steve Irwin to take up golf. However, if you like Steve Irwin then the crocs are an advantage, and golf on Animal Planet could introduce the game to a whole new group of possible enthusiasts. If crocodiles are not to your liking, then golf courses could stock the water obstacles with piranhas. Similarly, mining the sand traps or placing snipers in the trees would provide opportunities for sports bettors that do not exist today and would allow more second rank golfers to get on the leader board than is possible under the current rules. Or one could simply electrify the rough and share the burdens of electrocution equally. In any case, golf's change from a tepid middle class game to a full fledged extreme sport will certainly increase the game's audience and lead to more people taking up golf, which will, in due course, lead directly to an increase in the PGA's revenues.

BBC EXPANSION INTO THE ARAB MARKET: One wonders why the BBC is bothering to set up a Arabic language television service to compete with al-Jazeera, given that there isnt that much difference between the two organizations and their coverage of the Middle East now.

LAMPOONS, BY JOSEPH ADDISON: I should probably take this advice, but I think I will just skip it. As the ill natured man Addison speaks of in his essay, I find venting my spleen at the passersby a good way to pass the time of day, in much the same way that bored chimpanzees enjoy flinging their feces at the people who gawk at them in the zoo.

A BELATED BLOOMSDAY: For those of you who actually like reading modernist fiction on a computer screen here is James Joyce's Ulysses in its entirety. Enjoy.

SOFT SOAP: It seems that the seaworthiness of Ivory Soap was not one of those happy accidents that change the destinies of men and of nations, as has long been reported. There was no production accident involved; they knew the soap would float all the time. Yet another comforting myth shattered. It does make you wonder what else Proctor & Gamble is hiding from the consumers of their products.

A CLARIFICATION OF TERMS: I wish the media would stop referring to the killing of hostages as executions. Perhaps I am looking at the term too much from its American perspective; in the United States a person is executed after a trial and after exhaustive appeals to higher courts to make sure the condemned man was given a fair trial and that his rights were not violated or that the court that condemned him did not commit a procedural violation in sentencing the man to death. None of this occurred in the cases of Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, Paul Johnson, or Kim Sun-il. These people were not executed; they were murdered by savages. For those of you who may object to my use of the word savage, finding it over judgemental or lacking in concern for the historical forces that have shaped these people, tough shit. But come now, this is The Passing Parade; "We are growing serious, and let me tell you, that's the next step to being dull." --Joseph Addison.

FLATULENCE AS ENVIRONMENTAL THREAT: I realize that you may not regard burping sheep or farting cows as a major threat to the ecological balance of our planet, but they are, as evidenced by the work of some of the finest scientific minds of our time. However, if we are to solve this grave problem then we as a society should not look to science, for science can only give us mechanistic answers to the great questions, but rather to the home, where the larger issues of the day are played out, usually at very high decibels if a teenager is involved. We must ask, what has happened to etiquette and simple courtesy in this country when even barnyard animals feel free to cut the cheese and belch whenever they damn well feel like it? Sheep and cattle of an earlier and simpler generation would never have openly passed gas in public, regarding it as the act of a ignorant pig, who, then as now, distinguished themselves by acting like pigs, but now you see flocks of these animals hanging out on street corners, drinking beer, listening to loud music, and passing gas with abandon.

One wonders where all of this is going to, if it is going anywhere. The lack of civility in modern American barnyards poses a threat to the well being of the Earth, yet no one seems to care one way or the other. It is almost as if the vast majority of people simply do not care to bring up the issue. Sheep may burp and cattle may fart in public and no one is prepared to say that this behavior is unacceptable. There seems to be a general squeamishness when it comes to this question; it appears that most people, cognizant of the role sheep and cattle play in supplying the American dinner table, do not want to mention the problem for fear, in our multicultural times, of privileging one species over another. But clearly even the most ardent supporters of multiculturalism can see for themselves that deliberate rudeness of this sort tears at the civil fabric that holds our society together. What if everyone decided to burp and fart whenever and wherever they took a notion to do so? The idea that the ultimate fate of these creatures excuses their disgusting behavior is codswallop squared to the nth degree. One may similarly argue that human beings have the right to vomit in the street or to pop old ladies’ kneecaps off with a crowbar or call romaine lettuce spinach and sell it to unsuspecting passersby in the street, and that such behavior is acceptable because someday we will all have to go to the dentist.

Scientific research is a wonderful thing, but in this case science is not needed. What is needed is a return to the traditional values of the American barnyard, although whether that is possible in these days of five hundred channels and instant gratification remains to be seen. The corrupting influence of modern popular culture, in all probability, makes the traditional values seem corny and old-fashioned to the young, who will do anything to make sure they are not seen as being totally out of it. Perhaps it is possible to appeal to their sense of environmentalism, but even that seems an iffy proposition these days. It seems to me that we have arrived at a terrible state of affairs when we can no longer call upon the idealism of youth and must instead use the devices and potions provided by science to have sheep and cattle do what their parents and grandparents did without thinking about it.

BRUCE, BRUCE, AND BRUCE: THE PHILOSPHERS SKETCH: I realize this marks me as irredeemably shallow, but whenever I hear the phrase Australian philosophy I invariably think of this.

DEAN SWIFT: FINANCIAL AND PARENTING ADVICE: Tired of the kiddies? Want to earn money at home? Well, it's possible if you just follow Jonathan Swift's advice on parenting. The popular children's author has plenty of good advice on how to get the most out of your children.

THE BELOVED VOLE, OR MONOGAMY, SUCH AS IT IS: You know, with so many pressing problems in the world it makes me wonder why anyone would spend good money studying why one species of vole is faithful to its partner while some other species of vole is not. I also don’t understand why anyone would see the end result of this research being a scientific way of enforcing the Seventh Commandment. I mean, if these guys did come up with a way with genetically guaranteeing that a man would never cheat on his wife, what would Oprah and Jerry Springer put on the air? I suppose that Oprah could talk about her favorite novels all day long and Jerry could put on panels of economists arguing about the inflation rate and its meaning to the current global macroeconomic order; watching economists argue is always entertaining even if you have no clue what they are talking about, which is okay since they have no clue what they're talking about either; but let's face it, watching economists go at it is not nearly as interesting or entertaining as finding out you are pregnant with twins and your husband is cheating on you with your underaged sister and that he's given you a sexually transmitted disease while he has robbed you of every penny you own and sent your aged parents to rot in a leper colony in French Polynesia. Now that's entertainment.

ABORTION AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: Rich Lowry poses an interesting question in the National Review about why abortion advocates, excuse me, pro-choice advocates, try to avoid the word abortion whenever they can. Actually, there is nothing terribly mysterious about the reason; in Politics and the English Language George Orwell quite correctly points out that "political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Even the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a true blue liberal Democrat, said that partial birth abortions were too close to infanticide for him. That's because partial birth abortions are infanticide, complete with a legal fig leaf and a complete set of justifications so that no one has to actually call murder by its right name.

GOD AND THE PLEDGE: The Lord remains in the Pledge of Allegiance due to the somewhat conspicuous cowardice of the United States Supreme Court. The Lord sure does move in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.

JUST WHAT IS WRONG WITH BEING a fundamentalist anyway? Kenneth Minogue answers in The New Criterion.

ONE MAN'S TAKE on the Madrid bombings.

DEFENDING FEMALE CIRCUMCISION: You just know that someone on the left is going to start screaming about this sooner or later. The left, especially the radical feminists, all love to extoll the virtues of non-Western cultures over those of the paternalistic, materialistic and imperialistic West right up to the point where the noble savages do something that contradicts any of the left's pet shibboleths and then there will be hell to pay, or would be, if anyone on the left believed in hell.

CELEBRITY NEWS: I think this comes under the heading of no-brainer. I mean, really, by the time she's no longer the babe du jour more guys will have gone through her than subways through Grand Central during rush hour.

MARXIST ON THE ROOF: Last weekend one of my co-workers went down to the city to see the new Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof. She enjoyed mightily this depiction of pre-Revolutionary anti-Semitic Czarist oppression and has returned to our dust-laden book pile singing songs and dancing about as well as any very blonde gringa can. One of these songs is the ever-popular If I were a Rich Man, in which Tevye the dairyman and hero of the play, for those of you who missed the several thousand performances of the first Broadway run, numerous revivals, and the 1970 movie directed by Norman Jewison, sings the following,

“…all day long I’d biddy biddy bom
if I were a wealthy man…”

This leads inevitably to the question of just what is a biddy biddy bom and why is the practice limited exclusively to the wealthy? While an examination of Marx’s Das Kapital does not deal specifically with questions of biddy biddy bom, it is clear from the context Tevye provides that to biddy biddy bom properly one must control a significant portion of a society’s means of economic production, something very clearly beyond Tevye and his overworked herd of cows and goats, which he will be compelled to get rid of due to unfair competition from modern American dairies operated by gigantic multinational agribusinesses. It is clear, therefore, that to biddy biddy bom is part and parcel of the capitalist ruling class’s system of proletarian control. It is also clear that the practice itself is kept largely hidden from the workers, or at the very least kept prohibitively expensive so that the workers cannot engage in the practice, in much the same way that the poor cannot maintain stables of polo ponies, although several new polo teams are starting in some poorer sections of New York City, where, I am reliably informed, there are rats the size of ponies.

One must also wonder how this practice goes unseen in our current celebrity worshipping culture. To my knowledge no pictures of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or Donald Trump engaging in biddy biddy bom exist, although each of these men must have done so at one point or another, and the gratuitous firing of several contestants on The Apprentice leads one to suspect that these people were caught trying the biddy biddy bom, leading to their immediate termination by The Donald.

The working class’s inability to biddy biddy bom is today a grave threat to American democracy, a threat that will lead inevitably to a great wave of social protest from one end of this room to the other. For if the poor cannot biddy biddy bom, if their opportunity to do so is limited by the selfish greed of the plutocrats, then American society as a whole will be the worse off, and I will have nothing to complain about. In a side note, the Bidi Bidi Bom Bom sung about by the late Tejano singer, Selena, is not related to the subject of this essay; the words mean something very different in Spanish.

MY APOLOGIES for not blogging more; I am in the middle of a massive attack of sinusitis and my priorities have been elsewhere. It's amazing how much you take breathing for granted until you can't do it correctly anymore.