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| The Attack of the Great Tree Squid
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| Saturday, January 30, 2010 |
I am conducting auditions for the starring role in my new film to be known as The Attack of the Great Tree Squid. The heroine will successfully battle the Great Tree Squid armed only with a sword and her righteous wrath. There will be a little nudity required, but it will be done in good taste.
All of the ladies I approached about it so far are keen to do it except for one who objects to full frontal nudity. I am conducting auditions presently for the first scene outlined below. As the tree had to be removed as a traffic hazard, I am standing in as the Great Tree Squid in the auditions. This is taking up all my time now as there are so many ladies who want to star in the film.
The background chorus:
Give her this bow of burning gold
Give her these arrows of desire
Give her this sword
Oh, clouds unfold
Give her this chariot of fire
She will not shrink from mental fight
Nor shall her sword sleep in her hand
Until she has slain the Great Tree Squid
And cleansed his ilk from out this land
The first scene:
As the credits roll, the camera closes in on the slightly open window of the heroine’s bedroom where she lies on her back restless, but sleeping, her features outlined from time to time by the light of the moon as it emerges from clouds scudding across it. We see the tentacles of the Great Tree Squid come creeping slowly, slowly, through the open window and tug at her flimsy white nightgown, pulling it slowly back to reveal her shimmering, heaving bosom in the changing light. She shudders as the chill of a cold breeze opens her eyes and she sees herself entangled in the thrashing arms of the Squid and sitting bolt upright in bed, begins to scream uncontrollably...
The closing scene:
With a look of determined victory on her face which she holds unchanging for two full minutes, the camera then pulls back then to reveal her standing athwart the smoking remains of the Great Tree Squid, her sword aloft in her right hand, her buckler dangling from her left, her scabbard hanging loose around her hips, and as she slowly lowers her gaze to the smoldering ashes below her a faint smile plays around her stern features as the stentorian voiceover proclaims:
Behold the day cometh that shall burn as an oven, and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly shall be stubble; and the day cometh that shall burn them up, saith the lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch. But unto you that fear her name shall the sun of righteousness arise with healing in her wings, and she shall tread down the wicked, for they shall be ashes under the soles of her feet in the day that she shall do this, saith the lord of hosts...
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Byron Coney |
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| Forty Years Later in Swat
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| Tuesday, February 17, 2009 |
The attached article in the New York Times of February 16, 2009, brings to mind the description of Swat forty years earlier as set out in the obituary of the last Wali of Swat published in the London Times on November 7, 1787, also attached.
Swat Then and Now (PDF)
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| Byron Coney |
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| Response to Mr. James Kilpatrick
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| Tuesday, May 15, 2007 |
View my original letter
May 14, 2007
Dear Sir:
Are you just testing your readers to ascertain how many out there are literate enough to catch your mistake in identifying the comment of Cassius to Brutus about the stars as part of (presumably) Antony’s funeral oration which every schoolboy knows? Or perhaps you were merely harkening back to your own days as a schoolboy, with satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwilling to school? Or are you simply ignoring your own oft-repeated catechism to always check your sources?
I think it was Macaulay who first came up with the universal attribution “. . .as every schoolboy knows. . .” but you could look it up, (as, who was it, Casey Stengel? used to say). Punctuate that.
Sincerely,
Byron D. Coney
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| Byron Coney |
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| Friday, July 14, 2006 |
February 21, 2006
Governor Christine Gregoire
County Executive Ron Sims
Mayor Greg Nickels
Legislators, King County Council Members, Seattle City Council Members:
In reference to the mooted proposals to renovate the Coliseum in the Seattle Center (or whatever it is now called) . . . . it is deja vu all over again.
Some years ago when the decision was made to repair the Kingdome roof at more than the original cost of construction I had suggested to you and other assorted public officials and pundits (all of whom were unresponsive) that the miracle of modern structural engineering made it appear that we must forever abandon the hope that the Kingdome would be allowed to fall into ruin so as to attract some latter-day Edward Gibbon, who could sit musing among the rubble, much as Gibbon himself had done centuries ago surrounded by the stones of Rome, to be disturbed only as he was by the 21st or perhaps 25th century equivalent of bare-footed friars at their vespers or memories akin to those of earlier times recorded in 1430 by the Pope’s servant, the scholarly Poggius, whose diary (unearthed by Gibbon) related how “the forum of the Roman people, where they assembled to enact their laws and elect their magistrates [was] now enclosed for the cultivation of pot-herbs, or thrown open for the reception of swine and buffaloes”—the Campo Vaccino, or cattle pasture of the Fifteenth Century, the likes of which I had suggested could have been recreated in the tidelands which once surrounded Yesler’s mill before our massive monuments were constructed in the last century.
Alas, it was not to be, and with a new leak-proof roof and a carefully crafted Certificate attesting to the eternal integrity of the Kingdome, we had to forego the anticipatory pleasure of contemplating our future observer ruminating on the meaning of history surrounded by our ancient stone-filled site---only to have it unceremoniously imploded to make way for an even grander and more lasting monument, accompanied subsequently by a yet more improbably pretentious and forbidding structure devoted almost exclusively to a dozen gladiatorial events annually.
But, as Ernest Lawrence Thayer so eloquently expostulated more than a century ago, hope springs eternal in the human breast. The Coliseum must be allowed to fall gracefully into ruin so that we can look forward with great pleasure to our future Gibbon casting a discerning eye over the grand spectacle before him where our gladiators contended, our politicians and lobbyists swarmed the basilicas of expensive luxury suites, where our rabblement hooted and clapp’d their chopp’d hands and threw up their sweaty night-caps and utter’d such a deal of stinking breath, and where our patricians outdid each other in the splendor of their regalia and their chariots; and where he can remind us anew, as Gibbon did among the stones of Rome, that history is little more than a register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
Perhaps with luck we may even be able to persuade some failed or failing firm such as Enron or General Motors to purchase the naming rights to such a lasting monument.
Yours, etc.,
Byron D. Coney
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| Byron Coney |
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| Alan Bennett visits America
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| Tuesday, July 11, 2006 |
The May 15 New Yorker reports that Alan Bennett, the British playright, actor and critic, is visiting America and is quoted as saying: "If I had one thingto say to America now, it's don't trust in God. . . The one thing I've learned is that, whatever your problems are, God won't really help."
You know, he's right. The time has come to get rid of "In God we trust" on our coins and currency. We do not trust in God, besides which it is a violation of the First Amendment for the government to say so.
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| Byron Coney |
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