"Kibbles 'N 'Bits 'N 'Shit."

"Adversity is the good man's shining time." EDWARD YOUNG.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

There is a standard spiel, used by Dog and his bounty-mad gang, by which they sentimentally justify their chosen avocation.

Why, Hal, 'tis my vocation, Hal;'tis no sin for a 

                                             man to labour in his vocation.

Lest onlookers think that Dog is a grubbing, mercenary cur, he always reminds the perp and the public and the "studio audience at home" that if he doesn't collect the bounty, he foregoes the amount and that money is stolen directly from his "children's table."

What exactly is this "children's table"? I have sometimes wondered. Do the little kids - Gary Boy and all his tiny uncles and aunts who are actually younger than he is---

"I'm my own Grandpa"

--- all sit at a miniature table that is overlaid with banknotes and coins? Is this the celebrated "children's table" so often mentioned in these speeches?

(While I am on the subject, I might as well admit that I don't have the least understanding of the basics of bounty-hunting. Why is Dog foregoing the money? Does he put the money up in the first instance? Then how does he actually earn any money? At best he would break even; at worst he would be ruined. Can anybody explain bounty-hunting to me?)

(On reflection, don't bother.)

Anyway, in the episode I watched today Beth muffed up the standard spiel. She went:

"They all think they're tough. But you know what? They're none tougher than me when it means they're gonna take the food off my children's table. Because then the lion comes out!"

[Pause. Beth turns and starts to get into her SUV. Stops. Turns and adresses the camera again.]

"The lioness."

Beth when she was saying this was putting on her so-called "street-Hawaiian" voice. She goes, "Sistah."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I was watching an episode of the show recently and they were in a very specific situation, waiting for a perpetrator who was deep in a rural, jungle area of the "Big Island" and they were going to catch him before he fled in the morning. Then some music played and the lyrics were ridiculously apt for their situation. It was like a "nu metal" song that went, more or less:

"I've got to get up early

To escape the shack

To travel through the canebrake

To escape from the bounty hunters

Whose names are Leland and Dog

Youngblood and Beth

Not forgetting Duane Lee"

"They're coming up the back roads in their SUVs

I'm on my moped

I'm an ice addict

Charged with 'paraphernalia possession'

With a history of spousal abuse."

"Bethy In Disguise With Glasses"

Judy in disguise,
Well, what you aiming for,
A circus of horrors, yeah,
Well that's what you are.
You made me a life of ashes,
I guess I'll just take your glasses

On Dog the Bounty Hunter, Dog, Beth and Youngblood are on the "big island" planning a crafty trap. They aim to catch the female perp as she arrives at the airport. Dog goes, "We're going to have Beth sneak up on her in disguise."

You could see the incredulity in Youngblood's eyes. He was patently thinking, "What are you going to do, Dog? Give Beth radical breast reduction surgery before she leaves the house ?" Of course, proper etiquette dictated that he didn't say any such thing; but canny viewers could read the meaning in his facetious smirk.

Then Beth comes in, wearing a straw hat and some sunglasses and goes, "This is my disguise."

She said, "I didn't want to wear something too flamboyant and eye-cathing."

Staring at her colossal "bosom," which is after all Beth's most prominent attribute, Youngblood goes, "With that straw hat on you look like a completely different person!!"

No he didn't actually say that but he should have.

I should write the script for this show.

Of course it isn't scripted I'm just joking with you.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The summarised description for another episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter says:

"Dog hunts a man he knows very little about and does not like."

What else, after all, need you say?

"Give 'Em Enough Rope, Brah"

More Notes From the Back Seat---

Freddy, the short spare verminous wight who they caught asleep in his beat-up flat-bed truck surrounded by baggies containing "pharmaceuticals" and miscellaneous stolen plunder and a switchblade close to hand...

This was Freddy, who so wildly over-reacted when they took him to the old back-seat, like they were going to kill him when they just offered him a cigarette. Maybe Freddy thought Dog Chapman was like the Krays, who would similarly offer a foeman a cigarette, and when the foeman opened his maw to take the cigarette a Kray would punch him in the open mouth, breaking his jaw in twain. It's a handy trick to know, no doubt. But Duane Chapman is no Reggie Kray.

Freddy was being dramatic. Beth said he was "an old-style convict," which is to say institutionalized and paranoid. He thought that they were going to beat him green and yellow when they were only offering to loosen his cuffs.

YOUNGBLOOD: Freddy, are you hungry? You want something before we go in?

FREDDY (THE PERP): I'll take a rope.

YOUNGBLOOD: Nah you don't need a rope. Listen, you know what... you never know what's gonna be tomorrow.

[PAUSE]

FREDDY: No, I know what's tomorrow.

YOUNGBLOOD: Nah, brah, a rope is, it's a permanent solution to a temporary problem... The only advice I can really tell you, brah, is to start praying about it.

[Camera cuts to the harrowed, sober look on DUANE LEE'S face.]

[DOG bounces onto the back seat.]

DOG: My brother said you said something about a rope. Don't be stupid.

FREDDY: I'd let you shoot me, you know that?

DOG: But brother, I wouldn't be the one to do that. Right? I'm the guy that helps you out of the water when you're drownded. So I can't be that kind of guy.

Dialogue like this you can't buy. You couldn't make it up! My wife, who used to gamely chuckle and gasp along at the various antics and saws and cutting up and sich a gittin upstairs of Dog and his family, now haughtily disdains it as "vulgar, coarse, white trash" and "a libel on the good people of Oklahoma." Never mind that Duane Chapman was born in Colorado and the show is set in Hawaii. My wife has lost her sense of humour. Acts all hoity-toity like just watching this show will lower her IQ. Now she watches High Society and has taken Jules Kirby as her guru. Then she flips bloops and flops across the channel wavelengths and settles on watching The Hills.

I don't even hate The Hills. I find its vapidity freeing in a zen-mass-mind-ultra-suicide sort of way. Watching The Hills you know positively that no matter what befalls you hereafter it can't get worse than this moment right here sitting on the couch watching Spencer and Heidi canoodling and crooning unparalleled bollocks.

My least favourite character is Audrina.

To return to Dog, The Bounty Hunter: The difference between Dog and The Hills is that the viewer shall find illumination (nearly wrote humiliation) along the back-by-ways and the dirt-paths as we goe through the show together. Like The Amazing Race it opens up your skull with new and radical experiences. It doesn't simply confirm what you already knew (that Spencer and Heidi are voidoids and Brody Jenner is a horse's ass.) I would not likely run into a Hawaiaan wife-beating meth-gulping string-bean scum-bag on the streets where I live. In Greenpoint our wife-beaters are Polish and drink paint-stripper. Of course in Williamsburg, on Bedford Avenue, everybody seems like a character off The Hills. Plus The Hills is scripted so you shan't find folk saws like those that generously dot the above dialogue.

That said...

They should totally have a cross-over, brah.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I liked how in this one episode Beth broke Dog's pinkie finger half in two and he goes "The fuck's that for?" The editors and the censors missed that because they kept it in.

Brah I laughed dude.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Speaking of calling people "brah," when is the prop'rest time to do so prithee? I saw on one episode a man called his own wife "brah". I said to my wife, "Wife - brah - is it right to call your wife 'brah'?"

I thought "brah" was short for "brother" but wife reckoned it was Hawaiian for something more profound.

Da kine.

Urban Dictionary says:

"This is the slang term for "bro" which is slang for brother..a slang inside a slang. THIS ORIGINATED IN THE STATE OF HAWAII! for those who think that it originated in Southern California or where ever, your are miss informed [sic- E.N.]. It is the pigeon (English-Hawaiian slang) word that is used state-wide in Hawaii not only by surfers but by all people born and raised in Hawaii of all racial groups. And it pains me when I hear cali haole [sic - E.N.] tourist say it.

[Examples:]

sup brah
howsit brah
a' brah we go beach
ho brah where you stay

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brah

Subsection 4 states: "Meaning: My brother/ close associate/ cousin/ or Kama'aina (person FROM HAWAII)."

Subsection 2 says: "Hawaiian Pidgeon Talk for friend. Orgin: 60's Hawaii

In kauai my cousin started it! ha!"

The people on Urban Dictionary are always useful for penetrating the hitherto murky mysteries of vernacular. One subscriber signs himself "Da Kine Fish OutaH WataH."

Subsection 13 says "brah" is: "How one tool refers to, or greets another."

Let this be the end of this worthy meditation. I still find it peculiar that a male biped might refer to his female spousal helpmeet as "brah". It's like when Ed Long used to call his girfriend Emma Halling "man".

"Emma man, what's for dinner brah?"

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Tough old convict though he was, bedraggled and hellbound a vulture though he was, however vile a killer he was I say, by the end of the journey Dog was literally dabbing tears away from Freddy's bleary eyes. As Dog said later, with fading sensitivity, "That was sad. Ker-BLAm, ker-BLAM."

I laughed at one point when the talk descended somewhat from the arcane old hobo folk-talk noted at the start of this entry, to the transcendental-bathetic bushwa we know all too well from previous late-night back-seat bull sessions. "Tough convict at first," Dog said (sounding rather like Herbie Popnecker), "then you mentioned his little girl and all he could do is cry. Very surprised."

And here was the key, don't you see?; Dog "mentioned his little girl" and the old-style small-time hood fell quite to pieces. "How old is she Freddy?" Dog goes. "Eight," sobs Freddy. "Seven!" coos Dog, who forgot his ear-trumpet that day. "Eight," says Freddy, clearer now and through grit teeth. "She's eight years old, pretty soon she'll be thirteen," Dog carries on. Well, Dog, I think I can be more precise than you in this instance. In five years she will be thirteen. Freddy should have said, "Yeah, and...? In fifty years we'll all be dead but what's that got to do with anything?" Unfortunately Freddy was pretty much a broken man by this point, reduced to lowest, vilest plankton, and he had nothing new to add to the banter.

It's really a crying shame he didn't say that, because it's true too - - - in fifty years we probably will all be dead.

Except for Heidi and Spencer.

Puppies "4" Sale.

Watched another episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter where the cops beat Dog to the suspect. Should this show be renamed Dog, That Whipped Puppy? Should this show be renamed Cringing Cur Cowed by a Rolled-Up Newspaper? Or should this show be renamed, succinctly, Cops?

Nothing daunted, after wasting fifteen minutes of my time with a case that goes nowhere, Bobby Brown and Dog and his family now rallied and went after a female petty thief. Surely even they can’t bitch this one up.

OR SO YOU’D THINK.

Perp worked out of a “video store” as a "model" and so Dog says, “Bobby you go into the store and pretend you want to hire her and get an appointment with her and then we’ll pounce.”
At this time Bobby is dressed in a t-shirt that says in large letters “Property of Bobby Brown, Bail Bonds” and he has his big  bounty-hunter badge swinging from around his neck. Surreptitious as ever. He flaps into the store and soon he bounces out again, saying, “He’s setting up an appointment now.”
Here be stealth.

So they're like a bunch of Scooby-Doo detectives scurrying and panicking in the forecourt of a mini-strip-mall and they go, "Quick she's coming, let's hide!" They duck into a building and Dog goes, as they scram through the plain wooden door, "Can you see through the peep-hole." A moment later as the door shuts: "Is there a peep hole."

The room they were in was a sort of abandoned seminar room.

When they "pounced" on the girl she just passively stood there and singularly failed to enter into the excitement of the moment. It's often that way on this show; the bounty-hunters get all worked up and enthused about the job and the chase and the thrill of the hunt, the spoor of the quarry, view halloo! and tally-ho!, right up until the moment when the perp has been caught and the perp is so bored and bland that the illusion is dashed. This girl simply misunderstood the arrest warrant. She said she didn't want to check in with the police until she had paid off her cell-phone charges.
This is, I believe, precisely what Hannah Arendt had in mind when she coined the phrase "The Banality of Evil."

Another idiocy while we’re at it: On the side of my Kellogs “Smart Start” cereal box (“Dumb Start” more like - a vapid cereal we bought while they were on offer and now that I have established conclusively that I hate this shit we have about ten boxes to go) is an offer to get the DVD of Marley and Me. What I ask you could possibly go wrong with a post-suicide-attempt Owen Wilson, a labrador puppy and Jennifer Aniston as the stars. Anyway, on the side of the box it says, “Get a $3 rebate when you laugh and fall in love with Marley and Me.”
I naturally thought of the following “exchange”:
“What if I don’t laugh and fall in love with Marley and Me?”
“Then you don’t get the rebate.”

"Dog the Bounty Hunter Versus The Sinister Circus of Crime"

Peculiar episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter I just saw.

You want to hear about it?

It was a bit like Otto Preminger’s Angel Face starring Bob Mitchum. The end was protracted and impotent – there was a false crescendo, a premature ejaculation, and then half an hour of just noodling. Like A Passage to India or Huckleberry Finn. Imperfect resolutions in each.

Leland it was who said, “I only had three hours sleep. I wasn’t even halfway through my dream.” Leave it to Leland to come up with the gnomic Heraclitean summary of the episode. Actually, isn’t that the beginning of Dante’s Commedia?

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita 
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, 
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

In the middle of the dream that is our life
I awoke to find myself
In the SUV with Dad chasing a fugitive
Who was no longer a fugitive.

The fugitive in question, one Nono, a serial beater of women (although everybody who knew him swore he was a swell all-round fellow), had gone down to the county sheriff’s “around about midnight” and had his girlfriend Mary “go his bail.” They kept quiet about this and went ahead made a deal for Nono to “give himself up” to Dog and his crew. The idea, it was surmised, was to catch Dog and his team for false arrest and so get them in turn humiliated and arrested while Mary – the schemer behind the scenes – would simultaneously collect some money off Dog for her “informing”.

A scheme worthy of Machiavelli – or the sinister minds behind the JFK assassination.

That’s complicated I realize. Imagine how I felt watching it. There were conspiracies everywhere. Beth said she was conducting “the investigation behind the investigation” and she made it a gendered issue (as they say in the academy) by solving the mystery with Mary Ellen while Dog was blundering around with this guy “Scott”.

Scott was a four foot ten double-agent sent by Nono’s malicious shadow militia to sabotage the Dog camp from within. Scott was expert at this, blundering and stuttering the whole time and ballsing up any investigation with his vacillation and hemming and hawing. Dog was naturally incapable of combating this cause he’s prone to hem, haw and space out vacantly himself.

Scott was so short he was like a sinister dwarf from a circus of crime. I expected him to turn up at any point in a clown suit and turn somersaults while throwing skittles at the team. But he lost out in the end because Beth donned her deerstalker and solved the conspiracy and begad she had the last laugh. She said, “Scott, we caught you out, interloper at the margins that ye are, and now you are expelled from society.”

Scott, who you see had once been a bounty-hunter himself and had found a sort of kinship there that he had never felt before outside of the circus, walked across the parking lot sniffling with his head hung in shame. He looked even smaller than usual, the figure he cut there as he trundled into the distance. He walked out to the perimeters of the outer city limits and then he kept walking down tords the creek. Perhaps he is still walking – or perhaps his figurative hat is floating.

Perhaps he hanged himself.
Nothing sadder than a small man hanging himself.

I was puzzled, though, why Dog and crew would pursue Nono after they knew that his bail had been paid and his warrant had been pulled the night before. They knew he was trying to scam them, but they still showed up. For what?

To taunt him, was the reason. I watched this story unfold for an hour just to see some childish chest-puffing and drubbing at its end?

Dog and his “pound” need to really work on their narrative endings.

Sometimes the cops come into Dog the Bounty Hunter and foul up the whole story. Dog is always put out by this, largely because he doesn't get his money when the cops arrest the perp. But also it makes for a poor show. Sometimes Dog is duly obeisant and says that the cops are "our big brother" but other times - like today - he spits the word "cops" like everybody else does.

It really is important to be able to finish a narrative with a flourish.Wisht I coulda––

"Duane Chapman's Hair."

Because you are pining for it like a whipped cur (a "smacked down" pup): DOG THE BOUNTY HUNTER.

Admittedly Dog's hair is a despicable disgrace and looks most like the matted maggot-ridden plaited strands of mud on an ancient Egyptian mummy, styled after the Babylonian Sphinxes in the Met using pre-Christian curling tongs.

Point conceded.

Still, when people say they don't watch the show because they hate Dog's hair, I am perplexed. Do these people generally only watch programmes with people with hair they personally aesthetically endorse? Who does that?

Fools.

They're all fools.

[Wanders off muttering.]

"Da Kine. Da Fuck?"

1) I have a dreadful habit of watching episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter that I've already seen. 

Usually I'm two thirds of the way through an episode of Dog before I realise, "Oh I seen this one already I know what happens." By which point I think fug it I'll watch it again.

Because life is so long that we can afford to waste time like this can't we?

I was watching this one episode with a female perpetrator who in her mugshot had badly-drawn on eyebrows. It was as if they had been drawn on with a big black magic marker - via the tremulous hands of a blind man. And when I saw her mugshot and those magnificent brows, I thought, "Oh I've seen this episode." But I kept watching, rapt in my sublime forgetfulness, and Dog and Beth and family were nosing about this woman's home - which was really just a dirtshack complex on a remote backlot, but it was full of hidden rooms. Lots of ninja hidey-holes. 

I thought I was watching Shinobi No Mono for a minute!

Heh.

You didn't like that one, all right.

Anyway, the woman was a "meth-head" and (naturally) also a single mother of six, but she in addition stood accused of stealing somebody's dog. Like that episode when that "Bonnie and Clyde" team stole Buddhas from outside a Thai restaurant. And so this time Beth goes, "What the fuck is this about you stealing a dog?"

"I didn't steal no dog."

Meanwhile Beth is, you can tell, trying to steal one of the woman's dogs herself. I know I've seen one episode where Beth actually did take the perpetrator's pet dog because she liked it and the perp was going to jail after all. So Beth is in the habit, let us say, of blithely taking other people's pets herself. And she was playing with this puppy on camera for ages. Lots of screen time for this one puppy. Eventually Beth had to reluctantly give the puppy back to the meth-head owner (who dully goes, "Drive safe now"), but you could tell that she had been hard at work angling to get the puppy for free. Like a child in a toyshop does - tries to get his or her parents to buy them something simply because they make such a public show of spontaneous fondness for it that the parents can't legally refuse.

Like my nephew in the Disneyland shop. He ran in there, sensing that the time was ripe to get gifts from the adults around, even when he didn't necessarily want anything. He wanted things in the abstract. He was picking up things willy-nilly and pulling a heart-tugging expression.

Beth was doing that very thing with this puppy, but it didn't work anyway.

And then she has the big brazen magnificent balls to accuse the perp of stealing a dog!

2) So then they have the perp on the backseat, and if you've read my earlier "posts" about the show in question you'll know that the backseat is a scene for a lot of soul-searching and hard questions. As the academics would say, it is a "site of radical cultural mediation and exchange." So as usual Dog and Beth are like Jay Leno, in that the first thing they ask the perp is if she's got any kids, and she goes "I had six, but one died."

And Dog, half-asleep and oblivious, goes, "And how old is she?"

"She WAS one-year-old -- WHEN SHE DIED in a car accident!"

So then, all tact and sensitivity, Dog goes, "Oh, da kine."

The fuck––?

"Da kine" is an old Hawaii word that doesn't have a set meaning and so can be said at virtually any times. Dog's company is even called "Da Kine Bail Bonds." And so when this woman tells him her daughter died aged one, all he can find in his human heart to say is, "Oh. Huh. Da kine."

One for the linguists, methinks!

"All My Sins Forgiven."

Dog.

Bounty Hunter.

What He Says.

Dog had a female mother-of-three "ice-head" on the backseat and was drilling her for her life story. He goes, "Talk story. Shoot."

For his troubles he got the usual crock-pot of gab and guff. Really a load of old rot. Baby Lissa was on the back seat with them rather than Beth, because - as Beth rightly says - Lissa has to learn what bounty hunters do if she's going to do this job. She has to participate in all parts of the job.

That was a really nice idea, Beth - a nice thought or emotion - but it didn't work at all because Lissa just sat on the back seat biting her bottom lip with her big Robin Gibb overbite. Her and her Dad together, they look like the Bee Gees sans Maurice (which is, after all, exactly what the Bee Gees are now). In fact Baby Lissa did on the back seat what baby Lissa does when she is in the bounty-hunting "field": that is to say, fuck all.

If she was a stray niece or a stepdaughter Dog would have kicked her off the team as quicky as he kicked off that weird drug ingester Justin, his wigger nephew; but since she is a flesh-of -his-flesh daughter he keeps her around and lets her slide along while Dog tells himself outrageous untruths about his daughter's mettle and efficacy.

Anyway they're all on the back seat and the ice-head stay-at-home-mom goes, "I was straight for fifteen years." Already at this point this had the awful ring of exhausted familiarity to me. "What started you off again," Dog mutters - scarcely interested himself.

"My father died," she said, and I thought then: "Haven't I heard this ballad before?"

Every time the perpetrators tell Dog how they "fell" there is always some sad story that mitigates the sin. It's like the American Idol auditions on the backseat there. (Did you see, incidentally, the recent round of American Idol auditions? People were seriously trying to wreak pathos from the fact that they had asthma. One girl who was in her late twenties complained to the panel that her parents had got divorced last year. She was a grown adult who lived away from home! Isn't it a statistical probability, by now, that the average American is the child of a "broken home"?) But this dead ur-vater motif... even Dog felt it was hooey, he goes gruffly, "Well, she admitted that she wasn't even close to her old man so it's just so much deflection of existential responsibility."

Then they arrested some worthless hoodlum gangbanger who was hiding in his mother's attic. The mother swore blind that Sonny wasn't there but she and all her swearing could not defeat the paranormal nose of "Youngblood" who says sotto voce to Dog, "I smell a female rat, cap'n, permission to go in?" Dog nodded in assent and sure enough they dragged the son out of the attic and the mother stood there coolly chawing tobacco as they did it. Like she was thinking, "Waal you got to try and beat the rap well innit." I laughed savagely - she had been shown to be a loathsome liar on television but it seems she didn't give a pfennig for the "television audience at home" or what they might think. She answered only to her personal genius of the hearth.

This seems the sign of the age - more people are appearing on television every day and they care less and less what the viewing audience at home thinks. This is not, as the anthropologists would say, a shame culture. Like: there are shows about overweight people where the contestants go through all manner of degradation violation and exposure and you wonder, "Do these people not have work-colleagues or schoolmates who will tease them to the point of suicide for this?" Maybe I grew up in a crueller time and place but we got teased for the smallest flaws in Sonning Common in the 1980s, I'll tell you. The averge schoolchild was both a sadist and a pedant, which is a critical hybrid indeed. And in that day there was no panel, with Randy, Simon and Posh Spice, there to sympathise because you had asthma or a weight problem.

You were simply given "grundies" and henceforth dispatched promptly with "bundles down the dip."

Anyway, I saw that and I thought, "My mum would have shopped me to the bountyhunter in a heartbeat and I am a better man for it." Mothers, don't commit perjury on television!

So they arrested the son, and there he was on the backseat and Dog is lecturing him against his anti-social affectation of carrying a loaded gun everywhere he would go. Then with that boring drivel out of the way Dog leans over and says, "What do your tattoos say?"

(I have seen this line used on the L train out of Bedford Avenue, only it was delivered on that occasion by a salivating old man leaning over a female hipster. Amazingly the girl was all too willing to describe at tedious length what her tattoos meant. I think this eventually, by dint of sheer boringness, fairly killed the lecherous old man's ardour and he abruptly returned to his introspective activity of "pocket billiards.")

Meanwhile the crook says to Dog that his biggest tattoo says, "All My Sins Will Be Forgiven" and he next tells Dog that he used to be "a dancer at church." Dog is suitably impressed by this. You could tell this by the way his eyebrows shot up. I was only thinking, "Since when do they have dancers at church?"

The mind boggles. What would the Reverend Cotton Mather say to hear this to-day?

And meanwhile Dog was all shocked, after all these years, still shocked that somebody who goes to church could at the same time be a gun-toting criminal.

This in America yet!

"The Female Pillock."

Lord thank-you for this day, bless us as we go out after this guy, let us catch him real fast in Jesus' name Amen." DOG THE BOUNTY HUNTER

Everybody's talking about Haiti right now and it's a genuine pity, because they've cancelled tonight's episode of Jeopardy to give us the latest news.

People are chiming in with their "two penn'orth" on this interesting subject. This has been a poor show for the people of Haiti but it has provided excellent publicity for Twitter. I can't seem to escape the ubiquitous "tweets" at the moment. No doubt some bold dragoon in the Humanities Department of YOUR university is even now "drafting" an essay (or even a "think-piece") on how the Haitian disaster was a "global turning point" for Twitter.

What possesses people, I merely ask, to hold forth passionately on subjects wholly removed from them? It is, I suppose, only a percentage of the human race that does it; unfortunately they are the most vocal percentage. These are the people who actually respond to fatuous requests for e-mails from radio shows and news anchors. These are the people who write to New York Magazine. They pledge money to NPR. They must speak - they must be heard.

It might be said that I am doing the same thing even now with these my words. The difference, my dear, is that absolutely nobody will read these words I am writing.

Anyway, so... on Dog the Bounty Hunter... uh...

You know I like Baby Lyssa, but it must be remarked that she is a confirmed yellow-belly. She recoils from even the rumour of danger. That's right - I'm calling her a coward.

Female cowardice is not a clearly-defined or well-studied thing. Women seldom get called cowards - it is almost exclusively an epithet applied to men. Like "bastard." When did you last hear a woman get called a "bastard"? It doesn't happen. Likewise the female coward.

Women can obviously be cowardly; why is it never remarked?

When, come to think of it, did you last hear of a woman being called a pillock?

Sometimes my canny observations are rejected by sober society. No matter. I tried, for a period, to claim at every opportunity that "nobody actually likes champagne; they just drink it when it's offered them." This is true for me, so I chose to see it as a universal observation. Nobody particularly refuted it for the longest time. Then I said it at New Year I think and Jonny Ames-Lewis, of course, said, "Nonsense Fabe. I like champagne."

The same is true, I argue anyway, of popcorn. Nobody genuinely likes popcorn - unless it is that popcorn so saturated in either cheese or caramel that it is no longer popcorn in anything but name. Even then, the only person who likes it is Oprah Winfrey - and she is famous for her debauched, haywire omnivorousness. She's like a grizzled grizzly bear that hesitantly sneaks to the fringes of an urban area, gingerly eating willy-nilly from the garbage. She can't distinguish good from bad, so long as it has "that crunch",. People at the cinema eat popcorn and soda solely because they are on sale in the foyer and they think that they must therefore do it. Idiotic thinking. All these supposedly critical people who were sitting at Film Forum watching Kurosawa's Stray Dog, munching on popcorn. When, I wonder, does a person become a pocorn-eating cinema-goer? When do they make that leap, that affirmation, that lethal twist? Generic people usually drink cola. They eat McDonalds and they play computer games. They tweet about Haiti. But when do they actually become generic people?

They're pillocks.