"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.

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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.

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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.

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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?"

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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––