strange adventure

Years ago, when I went to film/nostalgia conventions regularly, one time I went to one in Baton Rouge with a friend, Cliff Byrd. Cliff was a young freelance artist who had recently gotten married to a beautiful girl whose name I don't remember. He was a huge Edgar Rice Burroughs fan, which was appropriate because the guy who was putting on the convention was Caz Cazedessus, who at the time was considered the ultimate ERB authority on the planet. I was somewhat familiar with ERB (having read a lot of Tarzan books) and this particular subgenre of the whole collecting/fan deal but wasn't terribly interested in it.
Caz and I were friends I suppose, casual acquaintances really; he kept assuming, why I don't know, that I was an expert/huge fan of ERB though I kept telling him I wasn't. Once Cliff and I got to the convention, Caz offered to take us to 'his place' after the convention closed and said we could spend the night there. We both said, sure, why not? What neither Cliff nor I realized at the time was that Caz and his wife were in the process of splitting up, so later that night, Cliff and I and several others headed out in a caravan, not to his house in Baton Rouge, but a little place Caz had out in the woods. WAY out in the woods. It took us about two hours to get there. If you've ever driven through the backwoods of Louisiana or Mississippi, you know what I mean. It was hot and humid and dark and once we finally arrived, the house that was apparently Caz's retreat from the world (and his wife) was the same. No air conditioning, no nothing really. Absolutely miserable.
It was almost midnight by then. Caz and Cliff started going through his collection of ERB stuff and I was bored and tired and yes, a little drunk. I kept thinking, what the hell am I doing here? Cliff, who had stayed on the phone for literally hours back at the hotel with his new wife (sample conversation- I miss you... are you all right? repeat 50 times...) now seemed perfectly content in this backwater hellhole.
Finally, about three in the morning, I asked Caz if there was anywhere to go to sleep. He led Cliff and I up some stairs to a room that had two mattresses on the floor. No pillows, no blankets (not that we really needed any in this jungle) and said, there you go. Somewhat like the time on the hunting trip with Dad and Joe and the others, where I dreamed I was freezing to death in a metal shack and it was true, here I dreamed I was burning to death and being eaten by insects in a Louisiana shed that was slowly sinking into the swamp.
The next day, Cliff and I drove back to Fort Worth and I don't think I've ever wanted a shower so bad in my life.

nowhere to run

This is part of an article in the International Herald-Tribune about Saddam Hussein's last-ditch effort to escape coalition forces. I found it fascinating though as it seems based largely on information from a member of his inner circle, it is still questionable.

As American troops were fanning out across Baghdad, Saddam Hussein turned to his sons. "We are leaving now," he said.

The Iraqi leader was determined to make his escape before more checkpoints were set up around the capital. Saddam had not anticipated the fall of the city, and his plan was simple: Drive west toward Ramadi, where there were few American forces.

In an examination of Iraq's military strategy, the U.S. Joint Forces Command prepared a day-by-day reconstruction of Saddam's movements, which shows that his escape was desperate and improvised. The study also indicates that American intelligence knew little about his whereabouts during the war and that Saddam was nowhere near the site of two failed bombing raids intended to kill him.

For Saddam, the first strike was a surprise. Relying on CIA intelligence, President George W. Bush ordered a bombing March 19 at the Dora Farms complex southwest of Baghdad. A CIA operative had reported that Saddam was in an underground bunker there, and Bush hoped to end the war with one blow.

Two F-117 Stealth fighters dropped bunker-busting bombs on the site, while warships fired nearly 40 cruise missiles. The fighters scored a direct hit, and for a while American officials believed that Saddam was wounded or dead.

But the Iraqi leader was not at Dora Farms and had not visited it since 1995, according to statements made to American interrogators by Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, Saddam's personal secretary. The airstrike nonetheless appeared to rattle Saddam. After the attack, he arrived at Mahmud's home. The two men went to a safe house in Baghdad so the Iraqi leader could watch international news reports and draft a statement to the Iraqi people.

After an Iraqi man with thick glasses read the televised speech, American officials speculated that he was a double. In fact, it was Saddam, according to the secretary's account. Large text was printed on cue cards for him, but no printer was available and he needed glasses to read his writing. The tape was sent to the Information Ministry for broadcast.

For the next several weeks, Saddam moved through a network of safe houses. The United States bombed military command sites in the capital, but Saddam stayed in civilian neighborhoods. The United States never came close to killing him.

"Most of the leadership strikes were offset from where Saddam stayed during the war, denying use of government buildings, but not threatening his life," the classified study reports.

The Americans made a final attempt to kill Saddam on April 7 after the CIA was tipped that he was in a safe house near a restaurant in Baghdad's Mansour district. A B-1 bomber dropped four 2,000-pound, or 900-kilogram, bombs. The blasts killed 18 innocent Iraqis, according to Human Rights Watch.

"Saddam was not in the targeted area at the time of the attack," the Joint Forces Command study says.

Saddam did have a close call, but that was a pure coincidence. Early on April 7, he was in a safe house one and a half miles, or two and a half kilometers, from the route taken by United States troops on their second "Thunder Run" into Baghdad. Two days later, his situation was desperate. Army troops had moved into the western part of the city and the Marines were moving into the eastern part.

He appeared before supporters in Baghdad. But after his convoy encountered American armored vehicles, Saddam and his aides were frantic, and they forced their way into a Baghdad residence. As American troops searched, he hid there until morning.

Early on April 10, he decided to flee to Ramadi with his two sons and Mahmud, his secretary, according to the account that Mahmud provided after American troops captured him. Earlier, Saddam had thought that the main American attack might come from Jordan, but by now it was clear to the Iraqis that the United States did not have substantial troops in the west.

The escape soon became an ordeal. That night, the Americans bombed a building next to a Ramadi house where Saddam was hiding. Alarmed, Saddam, his sons and Mahmud got in their cars and drove toward Hit, spending the night in an orchard outside town.

The next morning Saddam decided they should split up to minimize the chances of capture. Qusay Hussein, Uday Hussein and Mahmud made their way to Damascus, where they were apparently turned away. Saddam's sons were apparently too hot for the Syrians to handle. They went back to Iraq, reached Tikrit and eventually Mosul, where American troops killed them in July 2003.

Saddam's first stop was Hit. In December 2003, American forces captured the unshaven Iraqi leader in a spider hole near Tikrit. On the walls of the dank hide-out were posters of the Last Supper and Noah's Ark; on the floor was a battered suitcase filled with clothes and a heart-shaped clock.

The Rutles

The song below will give you a taste of the Rutles, one of the most elaborate and longest-running pop parodies ever. Eric Idle came up with the idea while hosting Rutland Weekend Television, a Brit tv series in the mid-70's. He soon found an inspired collaborator in Neil Innes, a fellow with a real talent for conjuring up insane and catchy novelty songs; he wrote several for Monty Python. The idea was fleshed out over time until a whole Rutles universe was created.
I suppose I should point out that it was a spoof of the Beatles. Every album, every event in their storied career has a strange counterpoint in the Rutles' own story. Ron, Dirk, Stig, and Barry are John, Paul, George, and Ringo, respectively.
The Rutles came to America in a big way (well, maybe not as big as The Ed Sullivan Show) in 1978, after a couple of test runs on Saturday Night Live. SNL producer Lorne Michaels, a hardcore Beatle fan if there ever was one, fell in love with the concept immediately and convinced NBC to produce a special called The Rutles- All You Need Is Cash. The resulting 'story of the Rutles' did not draw a huge audience, perhaps because it was filled with so many in-jokes that only die-hard Beatles freaks would catch all the references. Another problem was that at times, it paralleled the REAL Beatles story so closely, it hardly seemed like a parody at all!
Still, there were many funny moments and the songs by Innes were fantastic; they were the real highlights of the production. 'Doubleback Alley,' 'Let's Be Natural,' and the priceless 'Piggy In The Middle' (see below) were brilliantly catchy spoofs of Beatles's songs. In fact, an entire album of them was put together in an elaborate 'Magical Mystery Tour'-type packaging and released by Warner Brothers, to middling success. One of the songs, 'I Must Be In Love,' even made the top 40 in Britain. George Harrison loved the project and appeared in the TV special in a cameo.
The Pre-fab Four, as they came to be called, lived on in the years after the show, maintaining a cult following and re-appearing in the mid 90's with a new album, Archaeology, which oddly enough coincided precisely with The Beatles' own Anthology TV series and albums.

piggy in the middle

this is the spoof of 'I am the Walrus' by the Rutles...

I know you know what you know
But you should know by now that you're not me
Talk about a month of Sundays
Toffee-nosed wet weekend as far as I can see

Hey, diddle diddle (whooo!)
The cat and the fiddle (whooo!)
Piggy in the middle (whooo!)
Do a poo poo

Bible punching heavyweight
Evangelistic boxing kangaroo
Orangutan and anaconda
Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, even Pluto, too

Hey, diddle diddle (whooo!)
The cat and the fiddle (whooo!)
Piggy in the middle (whooo!)
Do a poo poo

tekraaam ot tnew eiggip elttil siht

One man's civilization is another man's jungle, yeah
They say revolution's in the air
I'm dancing in my underwear
'Cause I don't care

Hey diddle diddle (whooo!)
The cat and the fiddle (whooo!)
Piggy in the middle (whooo!)
Do a poo poo
Do a poo poo
oink oink

Walkie-talkie man says "‘ello, ‘ello, ‘ello,"
With his ballerina boots you can tell he's always on his toes
Hanging from a Christmas tree
Creeping like the Bogeyman, gettin' up my nose

Hey diddle diddle (whooo!)
The cat and the fiddle (whooo!)
Piggy in the middle (whooo!)
Do a poo poo
A poo poo
Poo

..piggy had roast beef
and this little piggy had none
This little piggy went WOOOOOOO!!
....all the way home

(oink oink)