Strap in, you uncultured heathens, because today we’re going to the fucking ballet.  Because we’ve got class, don’t we, dear reader?  Damn right.

Rewind to May 29, 1913, when Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées became ground zero for a creative detonation that’d leave the arts bleeding and begging for more. Igor Stravinsky, a mad Russian genius with a penchant for sonic mayhem, unleashed The Rite of Spring—a ballet so raw, so primal, it made the powdered-wig crowd lose their goddamn minds. No tutu-and-slippers affair, this; this is a feral, earth-shaking ritual that’d ripple into the literary sphere like a tidal wave crashing through a library.

The setup alone is a fever dream: Stravinsky’s score is nuts (at least it was considered so then), all jagged rhythms and dissonant howls, conjures a pagan rite where a young girl dances herself to death to appease the gods of spring.  The premiere was a straight-up scandal. The audience rioted—fists flying, boos drowning out the orchestra—because this wasn’t art as they knew it; this was a declaration of war on tradition. Stravinsky later said he’d never seen such a “terrifying” reaction, and Nijinsky (the choreographer) had to shout counts from the wings just to keep the dancers on beat amid the chaos.

Why does this matter to a literary fiend? Because in addition to pretty much breaking music and dance,  The Rite of Spring cracked open the cultural psyche, inspiring writers to chase that same raw, untamed energy. Modernist scribes like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, already stirring the pot with their own rule-breaking verse, found a kindred spirit in Stravinsky’s rebellion. You can draw a straight line from the ballet’s savage pulse to the apocalyptic undertones of Eliot’s The Waste Land, published just nine years later in 1922.

This event, a glorious middle finger to the establishment, redefined what art could be. It dared to be ugly, to be real, to rip the veil off human nature and show the blood beneath. On May 29, 1913, Stravinsky lit a fuse that’d burn through the century, and we’re still feeling the heat. In that same spirit, let’s write something today that’d make the old guard clutch their pearls all over again.

N.P.: “Hau Ruck 2025” – KMFDM

Listen up, my young, well-meaning, but benighted reader: someone wished me a “Happy Memorial Day” this morning, and I damn near lost my mind. Happy? No. This isn’t a frolic through a field of daisies, some Hallmark-sponsored excuse to crack open a cold one and pretend everything’s peachy. It’s not the “kick-off” of summer.  It’s not just a great time to get a great deal on a new car down at the Fecal Creek Auto Mall.  Today, May 26, 2025, is Memorial Day, dammit, a solemn call to remember the soldiers who bled out on battlefields so we could sit here arguing about the best hot dog toppings. It’s a day to honor the dead, not to slap a smiley face on sacrifice. So let’s cut the crap and dig into what this day actually means, beyond the shallow platitudes.

Memorial Day—originally Decoration Day, born in the shadow of the Civil War back in 1868—exists to commemorate the men and women who died in military service. We’re talking about the ones who didn’t come home, the ones who gave every last breath for a cause bigger than themselves, whether it was storming the beaches of Normandy, sweating it out in the jungles of Vietnam, or facing down hell in the deserts of Afghanistan. It’s not Veterans Day, which honors all who served; this is for the fallen, the ones whose names are etched on gravestones and whispered in prayers. The first official observance saw folks decorating graves at Arlington National Cemetery, a tradition that still holds, and it became a federal holiday in 1971, pegged to the last Monday in May. That’s the raw history, but the meaning runs deeper—it’s about facing the cost of freedom, the kind of cost that leaves families shattered and futures unwritten.

So how do we observe it without turning it into a quasi-patriotic circus? First, ditch the “happy” nonsense and start with respect. Visit a cemetery—Arlington if you’re near D.C., or your local veterans’ plot—and lay a flower on a soldier’s grave. If you can’t get to a cemetery, take a moment of silence at 3:00 PM local time, part of the National Moment of Remembrance, and let the weight of those sacrifices sink in. Fly the flag at half-staff until noon, as tradition demands, to signal mourning before the day shifts to resilience. And if you’re near a military base, listen for the bugle call of Taps at dusk—it’ll haunt you, in the best way.

Don’t just stop at gestures, though. Educate yourself on the stories of the fallen—read about someone like Sgt. William H. Carney, the first Black Medal of Honor recipient, who took a bullet to keep the flag flying during the Civil War, or Cpl. Jason Dunham, who threw himself on a grenade in Iraq in 2004 to save his squad. Their courage isn’t abstract; it’s the kind of raw, unflinching bravery that demands we live better, not just grill better. And if you’re moved, support organizations like the Wounded Warrior Project or the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), which help families of the fallen navigate their grief.

Memorial Day isn’t just about celebration—it’s a reckoning. It’s about staring into the abyss of loss and vowing to remember, to carry the torch for those who can’t. We can certainly celebrate the freedom the fallen provided for us, but let’s remember to honor the dead with the reverence they deserve. Anything less is a betrayal of the blood they spilled.

N.P.: “The Star Spangled Banner/4th of July Reprise” – Boston

Today we celebrate the publications of one of the best, most popular American children’s fantasy books: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Picture this, dear reader: it’s May 24, 1900, and the world’s about to get a swift kick in its Victorian teeth. L. Frank Baum, some nutty scribbler with a penchant for the surreal, drops The Wonderful Wizard of Oz onto the shelves like a flaming bag of dream-dust, and—boom—the American frontier just got a whole lot weirder. Unlike traditional fairy tales, this is a full-throttle, technicolor fever dream, a book that grabs the prissy norms of its day by the collar and spits in their eye with a cackle.

Baum’s got guts, I’ll give him that. More than just writing a kids’ book—he’s smuggling dynamite into the nursery. His protagonist, Dorothy, isn’t some wilting damsel waiting for a prince to save her from the vapors. Hell no. She’s a Kansas-born badass, navigating a world so strange it makes your average opium den look like a Sunday picnic. She’s got courage, sure, but it’s the kind that’s forged in grit and desperation, not the polished heroism of those stuffy Victorian penny-dreadfuls. Baum’s playing a different game, blending fantasy with a fierce, unapologetic femininity that’d make the corset-clad moralists of the era clutch their pearls and faint dead away.

And let’s talk about the world he builds—Oz, a place so vivid you can practically smell the emerald ozone. It’s a kaleidoscope of wonder and menace, where scarecrows talk, lions whimper, and a wizard’s just a conman with a hot-air balloon. Baum’s storytelling doesn’t mess around; it’s got the raw, pulsating energy of a carnival barker who’s three sheets to the wind but still knows how to work a crowd. He doesn’t coddle you with moral lessons—though, sure, there’s some lip service to resilience and heart and brains. But what Baum’s really doing is handing you a pair of ruby slippers and saying, “Go figure it out, kid.” And it’s that sort of thing, dear reader, that spawns a franchise still kicking 125 years later.

Let’s not kid ourselves: those ruby slippers (silver in the book, but we’ll let Hollywood have its glittery rewrite) aren’t just footwear. They’re a mythos, a symbol of defiance and magic that’s outlasted empires. With this book, Baum lit a fuse. And on that fateful day in 1900, the explosion started a wildfire we’re still dancing in. So raise a glass to the man who gave us Oz, where the yellow brick road leads straight to the edge of sanity, and the only way out is through.

I am significantly behind schedule in book production, but I’m going to be working overtime to get back on track.  I’m being contacted by an almost inordinate number of folks about marketing and publicity for either book.  This herd needs to be culled, but I’m already too busy to bother with that, so I’m hoping by laying out a couple of truths, a significant self-winnowing might occur.  To that end, here we go:

1. If you have your “preferred pronouns” in your signature block or bio, I’m not working with you.  Not a chance.  You might as well put at the top of your email, in bold, red letters: “I don’t even understand elementary English grammar.”  Because either you are truly ignorant on how the various parts of speech work, or you do know how pronouns work, but you’re so spineless and weak that tossed the rules of grammar out of your little apartment window because you instantly buckle to pressure from The Herd.  Either way, I can’t respect you, and, thus, you have no place on my team.
2. I will not be speaking to or sitting for interviews with any corporate media outlets.  Not their American offices, not their Australian offices, not their British offices, none of them.  None.  Not one.   They blew their credibility out with me years ago and I have nothing but the deepest contempt for each of them.  Now that the extent of their egregious lies are starting to come into public view…all the deliberate deception around Covid, it’s origin, the efficacy and associated dangers of the vax…now the blatant and treasonous cover-up of a president who was quite obviously an absolute idiot with dementia before he even took the Oath, of whomever was actually running the country and using the autopen…and the myriad “smaller” cover-ups they have knowingly and actively participated in…I find it all disgusting, and what little credibility corporate media ever had is now circling the drain and I hope will be completely flushed away soon.

In other writing news, I’ve decided tonight is the night: a marathon viewing and review of the entire Human Centipede Trilogy.  Might as well get this over with.  Wish me luck.

N.P.: “I Wanna Be” – Fluke

Greetings, dear reader.  Today, we pour some out for my ass.  My ass died last night.  At least I think it did.  It actually fell off and stormed off in protest, mumbling darkly about outrage and knowing its rights, and I’m not exactly sure what happened to it after that.  To be fair, several other people’s asses fell off, and I know the asses were, for a time, huddled in a corner, talking about unionizing, unfair practices, and hostile work environments.

Here’s what happened: last night at the dojo was the annual Night of 1000 Kicks…basically a kick-a-thon to raise money for the Wounded Warriors Project, which is about as noble a cause as I can think of.  Great.  Proud to be a part of it.  So I show up with about 11 other of the more hardcore students (being challenged to do 1000 of anything is more than the average student can even contemplate without breaking down in personal maggotry and despair).  We only had an hour to do all the kicks, so we got started right away.  First off was 100 groin kicks.  These are easy kicks to do, and normally I can do them all day…but knowing this was just 1/10th of what we were doing had a rather deleterious psychological effect.  I quickly decided on a quantity-over-quality strategy, so these early kicks didn’t have a lot of juice behind them…so long as my foot made contact with the bag, the kick was good.  Up next was 100 sidekicks.  And this was when my ass started to pipe up with the bitching.  I didn’t pay much attention to it as I was concentrating on getting the kicks done.  The next hundred were outside crescent kicks, and that’s when my ass, in conjunction with my hips, thighs, and lower back, became more vociferous.  I took a quick break and hydrated a bit, which my various parts seemed to appreciate.  But the respite was short-lived, and then we got into kick combos…25 sets, with each set involving 4 different kicks.  That’s when my ass staged an all-out rebellion, and started refusing orders: I would send the signal to kick, but my leg would just sit there, frustrated because it couldn’t do anything without the cooperation of my ass.  After that, things became a bit of a blur.  I can’t tell you what sort of esoteric combinations we did, but doing them involved me overriding the will and protestations of my ass.  I managed to complete the thousand kicks, but as soon as I was done, so was my ass.  That’s when it fell off and stormed off in a huff.  “Fuck that thing,”  I thought at the time…”It’s nothing without me.”  Which is true.  I mean, what’s it going to do?  Try to find some assless person who is willing to roll the dice on what is, quite frankly, a narrow, skinny, and now uppity ass for a permanent position?  I think not.  My ass looks quite ridiculous on me…on anyone else, it would be patently absurd.

I am feeling the absence pretty strongly today, mainly when it comes to sitting down.  Now having nothing to sit on, I’m forced to stand while I do anything, including writing this dispatch to you, dear reader.  And my pants just don’t fit right today.  I’m not sure what to do at this point.  I guess I’ll hit up the Fecal Creek Flea Market tomorrow and see if it’s there.  If you’ve seen my missing ass, please contact me through the usual channels.  I’ll probably set up a GoFundMe tomorrow, but for now a $7 reward is being offered.  I’m supposed to attend an alcohol-intensive barbecue/pool party this weekend, and it would be more socially acceptable if I was able to sit for at least part of the time.  And I’m worried they won’t let me get in the pool without an ass.

N.P.: “Your Fandango” – Todd Rundgren, Sparks

We go from bees to teas, dear reader, as today—May 21st, this very annum of our collective unraveling, 2025—is International Tea Day, a evidently hallowed 24-hour span where we’re supposed to genuflect before the steaming altar of Camellia sinensis and its myriad permutations. Tea, that ubiquitous elixir, that alchemical slurry of leaf and water, which, let’s be honest, is less a beverage and more a civilizational crutch, a liquid tether to sanity for billions. It’s the drink that’s been sloshing through human history since some ancient Chinese mystic decided to boil a bush and call it divine. And here we are, centuries deep, still worshipping at the porcelain shrine of the teacup, still chasing that delicate, tannic high.

Imagine: a world awash in tea, from the bone-white cups of Darjeeling in Kolkata’s crumbling colonial haunts to the chipped mugs of truck-stop Earl Grey in some godforsaken Midwestern diner. Tea is the great leveler, the one addiction we don’t whisper about in shame. It’s the morning jolt for the bleary-eyed salaryman in Tokyo, the afternoon ritual for the tweed-drenched Brit, the late-night muse for the poet scribbling in a Marrakesh souk. It’s the drink that says, “I’m functional, but only just.” And on this day, this International Tea Day, we’re supposed to celebrate it—not just the leaf itself but the whole sprawling, caffeinated cosmology it drags in its wake.

Let’s not kid ourselves, though. The tea-industrial complex (aka Big Tea) isn’t all Zen and jasmine-scented transcendence. It’s a brutal, sweaty business, rooted in the calloused hands of pickers in Assam and Yunnan, where workers—mostly women, let’s not dodge the optics—pluck leaves under a sun that doesn’t give a damn about fair trade certifications. The supply chain is a labyrinthine nightmare, a global pinata of exploitation and middlemen, where every sip of your artisanal oolong carries the faint aftertaste of someone else’s misery. And yet, we sip. We steep. We pontificate about mouthfeel and terroir like we’re auditioning for a Wes Anderson film. The hypocrisy is exquisite, a Möbius strip of self-awareness and denial.

I think we’d be remiss on this International Tea Day to not talk about coffee, that overrated, bean-derived sludge, the poor man’s stimulant for those too impatient to court the sublime. Coffee is a sledgehammer—crude, bitter, a one-note adrenaline spike that leaves you jittery and hollow, like you’ve just mainlined an Excel spreadsheet. Tea, by contrast, is a scalpel, a symphony, a goddamn love letter to nuance. Where coffee stomps in with its acrid, burnt-rubber swagger, tea seduces with layers—floral whispers, earthy depths, astringent kicks that evolve with every sip. Coffee chains you to the grind, a caffeinated hamster wheel; tea liberates. You want health? Tea’s got antioxidants out the ass, while coffee’s just a diuretic middle finger to your kidneys. The choice is clear, you philistines: tea is the poet, coffee the propagandist.

But screw the guilt for a second—tea is also magic, pure and simple. It’s the only drug you can serve at a toddler’s birthday party without raising eyebrows. It’s the potion that fueled the Opium Wars (irony thicker than a London fog), the Boston Tea Party (revolution in a crate), and every late-night dorm-room bull session that ever veered into the meaning of life. Green, black, white, oolong, whatever the hell pu-erh is—it’s a spectrum of obsession, a taxonomy of taste that makes wine snobs look like dilettantes.

And the ritual! Oh shit, the ritual. The kettle’s banshee wail, the precise alchemy of water temperature (too hot, you scald the leaves; too cold, you’re drinking lawn clippings). The slow bloom of the infusion, the way the steam curls like a ghost’s finger beckoning you to some ineffable truth.  That’s fuckin’ poetic.  It’s meditative, sure, but it’s also a subtle fuck-you to the instant-gratification slot machine of modern life. Tea demands patience, demands you sit still and shut up for five goddamn minutes. In a world of algorithm-driven dopamine hits, that’s practically punk rock.

So here’s the deal, you jittery, over-caffeinated reprobates: today, on International Tea Day, pour yourself a cup. Doesn’t matter if it’s a $200-an-ounce Silver Needle or a Lipton bag you swiped from a motel breakfast bar. Raise it to the pickers, the blenders, the smug baristas who correct your pronunciation of “matcha.” Raise it to the billions who’ve made tea their north star, from samurai to suffragettes. Then drink deep, caffeinated reader…let the warmth hit your marrow, and feel the world slow down just enough to remind you you’re still human. Or at least close enough.

N.P.: “Fuck Me Up” – Pokey LaFarge

Today, dear reader, is allegedly National Bee Day, some granola-crunching, flower-crown-wearing, save-the-planet hippie holiday that’s got everyone cooing over the fuzzy little pollinators like they’re the second coming of Christ in a yellow-and-black tracksuit. And yeah, I’ll concede—bees are the least contemptible of the insect world’s miserable menagerie. They’ve got their pollination gig, their honey hustle, which, let’s be honest, is a goddamn miracle of nature, a golden elixir that laughs in the face of expiration dates. Bees, with their chubby, fuzz-dusted thoraxes and that almost endearing bumble-waddle, are the only bugs that don’t make me want to reach for a flamethrower. Kids dress up as bees for Halloween, for Christ’s sake—those little sugar-fiends know a mascot when they see one. Nobody’s out there trick-or-treating as a wasp, because wasps are the sociopathic cousins who’d steal your candy and piss in your pumpkin.

But let’s not get too misty-eyed. My general disposition toward insects isn’t fear—fear implies they’ve got some kind of upper hand, some psychological leverage. No, it’s contempt, pure and unadulterated, a seething, bone-deep loathing for the skittering, buzzing, biting bastards that seem to exist solely to fuck with humanity. Scorpions? Those armored little psychos with their smug, pincered swagger and venom-tipped tails? I’d rather square-dance with a rattlesnake. Camel spiders? Jesus wept, they’re like something Hieronymus Bosch dreamed up after a bad acid trip—eight-legged nightmares that look like they’d eat your soul if they could figure out exactly how to chew it. No fear, mind you—just a visceral desire to see them obliterated, preferably by a meteor strike.

Most insects are just evolutionary fuck-yous, pointless irritants that contribute nothing but chaos. Hornets and wasps?  There’s no justification for their existence, no ecological PowerPoint presentation that could convince me they deserve a place on this planet. They’re like the drunk uncles of the insect world, crashing the picnic, stinging for no reason, and leaving everyone worse off. Zero redeeming qualities. Zilch. Nada. They don’t pollinate, they don’t make honey, they just dive-bomb your beer and ruin your day. If I could Thanos-snap one species into oblivion, it’d be a coin toss between those two.

Even the so-called “good” insects, the ones that eat other insects, are barely pulling their weight. Spiders, for instance—sure, they munch on flies, but let’s not pretend they’re out there waging some noble war on pestilence. They’re lazy, web-spinning opportunists who maybe catch a gnat once a week, then sit there like smug little landlords collecting rent. Inefficient doesn’t even begin to cover it. A single bat could clear out more bugs in a night than a spider could in a month, and bats don’t make you scream when they scuttle across your pillow at 3 a.m.

But bees—regular, non-Africanized, star-spangled American bees—they’ve got a pass. They’re the blue-collar heroes of the insect kingdom, clocking in to pollinate the flowers that keep our ecosystems from collapsing like a house of cards in a windstorm. Their honey is a sticky middle finger to entropy, a substance so perfect it’s practically immortal. And yeah, they’ve got that cute little aesthetic going—those stripes, that fuzz, that buzz that’s more charming than menacing. You don’t see kids dressing up as scorpions or camel spiders, because no one’s writing love letters to a creature that looks like it crawled out of Satan’s anus.

So, fine, National Bee Day, I’ll tip my hat to you. I’ll raise a spoonful of honey and toast the one insect that doesn’t make me want to nuke the planet from orbit. But the rest of the creepy-crawly brigade? The wasps, the hornets, the scorpions, the camel spiders, the whole chitinous cabal? They can burn. I’m not afraid of them. I just hate them with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. And if that makes me the villain in some vegan’s insect utopia, so be it. I’ll be the one with the honey jar, laughing while the rest of the bug world gets what’s coming.

N.P.: “Switchblade” – Link Wray

There’s too much nudity in this society.  Literally everywhere you look, regardless of what you’re looking at, it seems like you can’t go 10 seconds without some girl who doesn’t know how to wear a bra coming into frame, turning around, and twerking.  We reached critical mass with this years ago.  It actually got to the point where such things were no longer interesting, on a sexual, sociological, psychological, or any other level to most men.  In my case, it now elicits nothing but an eyeroll from yrs. truly.  I never thought I’d say this, dear reader, but fully clothed, even conservatively clothed women are now far sexier and attraction-inducing than their scantily clad, ass-jiggling sisters.  I am actually hopeful that our ridiculous culture does a take a hard turn back to the way things were when you had to a lot more than buy a $5/month subscription to see some girl’s butthole.

That having been said, I have tragic news on this completely mundane Monday: the neon-orange heart of Americana is bleeding out.  Hooters – yes, Hooters™, dear reader, that bastion of buffalo sauce and unapologetic cleavage – has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and the news hit me like a barstool to the skull.  “Son of a bitch!” I said when I first heard the reporting.  This isn’t just another restaurant chain gasping its last (we’ve had plenty of those recently); it’s a cultural artifact, a garish monument to a bygone era when we could still wink at our baser instincts without a morality cop screaming from the digital rooftops.  The end of Hooters is the end of something bigger, something raw and reckless, and I’m sitting here, gut-sick, watching the vultures circle.

The numbers are indeed grim, a $376 million debt pile that smells like overcooked ambition and undercooked strategy.  Hooters of America, one of the two outfits slinging wings and dreams, threw in the towel back in March, citing the usual suspects: inflation, labor costs, and a dining public that’s apparently too woke or too broke to drop $20 on a pitcher and a plate of curly fries.  Many of the restaurants are still open, limping along under the Chapter 11 umbrella, but the vibe is funereal.  Sure, the waitresses still smile, but it’s the smile of a boxer who knows the next punch might be the knockout.

Enter Hulk Hogan, of all people, striding into this mess like a bleached-blond-and-bandana’d deus ex machina.  The man who body-slammed Andre the Giant now wants to suplex Hooters back to relevance.  Through his Real American Brands, Hogan’s tossing an all-cash bid for the chain’s intellectual property.  Not the restaurants themselves…he’s not here to flip burgers or mop floors.  No, the Hulkster’s eyeing the brand, the logo, the mythic Hooter’s essence, to slap on beer cans, T-shirts, and maybe a slot machine or two.  His camp calls it a “perfect match,” a chance to resurrect Hooters as a symbol of “unfiltered Americana – fun, fearless, and proudly American.”  Fuck yeah.  Hogan’s Real American Beer, already a hit in Clearwater dives, was one of the first beers Hooters ever poured, so there’s history here, a kind of sweaty, fist-bumping loyalty.  But can a 71-year-old wrestling legend, more caricature than capitalist, really drag this sinking ship to shore?  I want to believe, but my faith is as thin as those shitty paper napkins at Hooters happy hour.

Hogan’s not alone in this crusade.  The original Hooters founders, led my Neil Kiefer, are clawing their way back into the game.  They’re part of a buyer group snapping up 151 corporate-owned locations, promising to steer the chain toward (mainstream acceptability.”  Translation: ditch the bikini nights, swap the low-cut tanks for something less likely to offend the TikTok censors, and maybe throw in a kale salad for the health nuts.  Kiefer’s got skin in the fight – his crew runs 30% of the franchised spots, including the top-grossing ones – but the plan feels like a betrayal to me, a neutering of the very soul Hooters once flaunted.  They’re betting on a family-friendly pivot, but who’s taking their kids to a Hooters for chicken tenders when Chuck E. Cheese is still wheezing along?  It’s a desperate gambit, and desperation is a lousy architect.

The private equity sharks, Nord Bay Capital and TriArtisan Capital Advisors, still own the carcass, but they’re not exactly weeping into their martinis.  They’ve been milking Hooters for years (heh), and now they’re ready to offload it to whoever’s dumb enough to bet on a comeback.  The bankruptcy court’s got the final say, and the clock’s ticking – 90 to 120 days, they say, before Hooters either rises like a big-breasted phoenix or gets carved up like a discount turkey.

What stings the most is the symbolism.  Hooters was a middle finger to propriety, a greasy, glorious celebration of excess in a world increasingly obsessed with sanitizing everything.  It was where you went to forget the cubicle, the mortgage, the slow drip of modern life.  Now it’s another casualty in the culture wars, another tombstone in the graveyard of casual dining.  Red Lobster, TGI Fridays, Buca di Beppo – they’re all crumbling, and Hooters is just the latest to stagger.  The American appetite for shared plates and shared fantasies is shrinking, and I’m left wondering if we’ve lost the stomach for joy itself.

Hogan’s bid, Kiefer’s buyout – they’re sparks in a storm, flickers of hope or maybe just denial.  I want to root for them, to believe that somewhere, in some dive bar of the soul, Hooters can still serve up a plate of wings and a side of defiance.  But the air’s heavy with defeat, dear reader, and the jukebox is playing a requiem.  Pour one out for the owl, friends.  I’m afraid the party’s over, and the tab’s come due.

N.P.: “I Want To Know What Love Is” – Laibach