ITS A FAMILY AFFAIR.

I suspect that most of us have extended family members we love but who also make us wince; the Aunt who pretends she doesn’t drink, the Uncle with the odd bathing habits or the nervous cousin who never went to college and yet seems to know a lot about certain kinds of chemistry. If you are so afflicted it may be helpful to remind yourself that that at least your family isn’t stark raving mad, and even if they are then at least one of them doesn’t think he is royalty. And in the unlikely event that they do, well then, at least they don’t think they are Herod I, also known as “Herod The Great”, also known as “Herod the Builder”, and “Herod the Fecund”. But he is probably best known as “Herod the Paranoid Homicidal Maniac”. But then no family is perfect, right?Herod was a second son and he certainly didn’t seem destined to be great. But then, neither did he look crazy, either. But he was. At 25 he had a wife (Doris) and child (Antipater) and was in charge of Galilee, a poverty stricken back water province of the Roman Empire. But then his father was murdered (poisoned), and his older brother committed suicide (he bashed his own brains out). And in 40 BC a rebellion actually overthrew Herod. Any less of a bullhead would have taken the hint and retired, but Herod refused. With a little help from Rome (the Senate officially elected him “King of the Jews” - without asking the Jews, of course), in 37 BC Herod returned, murdered the usurper and took the throne for himself. By this time he had dumped his wife and child. And to reinforce his ties to the religious fanatics (always a good idea in the Middle East) Herod now married the teenage daughter of a priest. Her name was Mariamne.Trying to keep peace in the family, in 36 BC, Herod appointed his new brother-in-law High Priest. But two years later somebody had a little too much to drink at a party and somebody said something stupid and Herod had his brother-in-law water-boarded to death right in front of the guests. It seems homocide was their "normal:". Then in 29 B.C. Herod had his wife Mariamne executed because he suspected she was conspiring against him.And if she had any brains, she was. So when his now ex-Mother-in-Law said Herod was so nuts he was “unfit to rule”, he had her eliminated too. In 28 B.C. Herod had his other brother-in-law (and the husband of his daughter) executed. And because he was now out of in-laws, in 23 B.C. Herod married his third wife, Miriamne II (And at some point a fourth wife, a Samaritan girl named Malthace, and a fifth wife, known as Cleopatra of Jerusalem). Herod now had enough in-laws to drive anybody crazy; not that he needed an excuse.As was to be expected, by 12 B.C. Herod had become convinced that his sons by Miriamne I, Alexander and Aristobulus, were out to murder him. Agtain. if they had any brains... The Emperor Augustus talked Herod out of killing his sons immediately, but when Herod got hold of a conspiracy theory he was like a paranoid dog in taxidermy school - he was convinced everybody was after his bones. It took him five years but Herod finally compiled enough evidence to convince Augustus that Herod was never going to let the matter drop, and with the Emperor’s reluctant acceptance, both of Miriamne I’s sons were tried and executed in 7 B.C. That left Antipas, his son by Doris (remember her?) the next in line, and in keeping with the tradition of dedicated paranoids before him, such as Ivan the Terrible, Josef Stalin and Dick Cheney, in 4 B.C. Herod had him executed, too.

What happened next must have left Harod speechless. He died - of natural causes in his own bed. I'll bet nobody in the Middle East saw that coming. After his passing Herod's kingdom was divided between his sons Phillip (by Cleopatra) and Archelaus and Antipas (by Malthace). But it was Herod Antipas who managed to best carry on his father’s high standards for familial lunacy, particularly when he divorced his wife to marry his brother’s wife, Herodias.

It may have been a "love match" it also ticked off his brother Archelaus, and two other people Antipas really didn’t need to have ticked off

at him. First, ala Governor Sarah Palin and the State Trouper, it angered Antipas' ex-father-in-law, King Aretas IV, of Nabtea, who promptly declared war on Antipas. And second it offended a local religious fanatic named John the Baptist. John condemned the marriage not only because Herodias had been his brother’s wife, but also because the new bride was Herod Antipas’s half sister.Generally it was a typical Herodian Family Feud. You see the lady at the center of this scandal, Herodias, had already produced a daughter with husband number one, Archelaus. The daughter was named Salome, and not only was Herod Antipas her uncle but now he was also her stepfather. The situation made Herod Antipas a bit sensitive to criticism, and he threw John the Baptist in jail, just to shut him up. And that was when, according to scripture, Salome did her little dance and dropped her seven veils. Her step-daddy Antipas then asked what he could do thank her for the performance, and Salome suggested, probably at the urging of her mother Herodia, that he could give her the head of John the Baptist. It seems a little strange that Josephus, who never met a tall tale he didn’t like, never mentioned this one, but it’s in the bible and I guess that means it just must be true. And the truth is, I’ll believe anything about that family.

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The VICKSBURG Campaign: Chapter one

I want to try an experiment. Please bear with me while I try to tell the story of the most amazing military campaign in American history, U.S. Grant’s campaign against Vicksburg, Mississippi. I will try and tell it in sequence and in real time. And I will begin with the observations of an amateur military genius, Abraham Lincoln, who tried to explain it to those who were celebrating the capture of Memphis, Tennessee on June 6, 1862. He told them, “…Vicksburg is the key. Here is the Red River, which will supply the Confederacy with cattle and corn to feed their armies. There are the Arkansas and White Rivers which can supply cattle and hogs by the thousand. From Vicksburg these supplies can be distributed by rail all over the Confederacy….Let us get Vicksburg and all that country is ours. The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pockets….We may take all northern ports of the Confederacy, and they can still defy us from Vicksburg. It means hog and hominy without limit, fresh troops from all the states of the far South and a cotton country where they can raise the staple without interference.” And I have never found a more cogent or accurate description of the strategic situation in the winter of 1862
*
New Orleans had been captured on May 1, 1862. That closed the Mississippi river at its mouth. And with the battles of Island Number Ten, and the river fleet Battle of Memphis, on June 6, 1862, the river was in Union hands down to the Tennessee/Mississippi border. Only a narrow waist between Fort Hudson, Louisiana on the West shore, and Vicksburg, Mississippi on the East, remained under Confederate control. Along its whole torturous course between those two high points, to a breadth of up to forty miles, the bottom land slowly melded into “The Big Muddy”, half swamp, part river and part solid ground only between floods. And only at Vicksburg was the ground on the East side of the river solid enough so that a railroad line could touch the stream. And so, after the debacles at Memphis and New Orleans, the Confederacy turned Vicksburg into “The Gibraltar of the Confederacy.” On paper it looked simple. The city was just south of a huge S bend in the river, which meant that any warships coming from the North would have to slow to make that bend. Accepted military thinking and some experience said they would never survive the bombardment from heavy artillery atop the bluffs at Vicksburg. And the town’s northern land shoulder was protected by the 200 mile wide and 50 mile thick swamp of the Yazoo river delta. That seemed to restrict any land assault from the North to the inland route, right down the line of the Mississippi Central Railroad.
*
Union Forces under General Steven Halleck followed that line and managed to occupy Corinth, Mississippi on June 1st, 1862, but every time he ventured out from that base, Rebel cavalry under Nathan Bedford Forrest would slip around “Old Brains”, capture his supplies and burn the railroad bridges. And Halleck would have to slink back again. At the same time the Union Navy ran war ships up the Mississippi River past the guns at Fort Hudson and tried to shell Vicksburg into quick submission. But this time the Confederates refused to give up the ground. By the end of the summer Halleck had been transferred to the East and by fall of 1862 Grant had been forced to retreat back to Memphis.
*
General Grant really had three enemies to defeat. His most dangerous opponent was the War Department in Washington, which meddled away the Union strengths. And then there was the river, which even after a century and a half of vast public works remains a twisting, tortuous, argumentative stream. It was worse so in 1862. Grant’s most easily defeated opponent was Lt. General John C. Pemberton, a Pennsylvanian who had chosen to fight for the South. He was a skilled officer who had been given limited means (12,000 men scattered between Vicksburg and Jackson, Mississippi) to defend an objective of unlimited importance. And Grant understood intuitively that all that mattered was to occupy the Vicksburg bluffs and permanently cut the rail line that ran from Vicksburg to Jackson, Mississippi. And it didn’t matter how he did it. He started by trying everything he could think of.
*
The Navy had begun a canal that might eventually cut off the river bend just above Vicksburg by joining the Walnut and Roundaway Bayous before reconnecting with the river below Vicksburg at the tiny hamlet of New Carthage. But when a dam at the northern end of the dig collapsed, flooding out the Union camps, the canal was abandoned. Next Grant tried less digging. There was a circuitous maze of bayous that logically seemed to eventually connect an abandoned Mississippi bend, Lake Providence, 50 miles North of Vicksburg, to the Red River just before it rejoined the Big Muddy above the high ground at Fort Hudson. But some how, no matter how close they came, the bayous always seemed to end just before reaching the Red. (We know now that in past ages the Mississippi did use the Red River’s bed to reach the gulf to the West of its current delta – and has been trying for fifty years to re-establish the same delta again.) Another route up the Tallahatchie was blocked by a Rebel fort. And an attempt to follow Steele Bayou to Black Bayou to Deer Creek to Rolling Fork Bayou to the Sunflower River to outflank Haines Bluff on the Yazoo also failed. And an attempt to dig another bypass of the big bend just North of Vicksburg, the Duckport Canal, also failed.
*
Still all those labors had kept Pemberton constantly trying counter and anticipate Grant’s next move. And Grant took notice of that. And that is why, on April 17, 1863, Grant sent Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson and 1,700 troopers of the 6th and 7th Illinois and the 2nd Iowa cavalry on a raid deep into Mississippi, to do as much damage to the Central Mississippi Railroad as possible, even cut it if he could. What was not clear at the time was that from the moment Grierson rode out of La Grange, Tennessee, Vicksburg had just five weeks left as a major Rebel supply base.

AN UNLIKELY COMBINATION OF EVENTS

I don’t know the truth of what happened to Yuri Gagarin, and it is unlikely I ever will. And if it seems strange that someone so famous could die so mysteriously you must remember that he was a hero of the Soviet Union, a place and a time where truth and lies were so intermingled as to make reality as thin as tissue paper. On March 27, 1968, so the story goes, Yui died in the crash of a training jet, and not even his widow or daughters will ever know with certainty what really happened to him. In the Soviet Union, rumors were part of the disguise. It was a very different world.
*
In 1961 the average yearly income in America was $5,315.00 and gallon of gas cost 27 cents. The city of Seattle completed the tallest structure west of the Mississippi river, the Space Needle. The 200th McDonald’s opened in Southern California. The hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls produced electricity for the first time. An X-15 rocket plane reached the edge of space at 31 miles high, and President John Kennedy asked Congress for $531 million to “…put a man on the moon in this decade.” And on April 12, the Soviet Union launched the first man into space.
*
His call sign was “Cedar”. The 5’ 2” cosmonaut was a typical fighter jockey, self confident and cocky, described as “virtually unflappable” by his instructors. He was launched from the dessert steppes of Tjuratam, Kazakhstan, just after 9AM (Moscow time) and he whistled a tune during his 90 minute orbital flight. “The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows, Where her son flies in the sky.” But unlike the American astronauts who landed at sea, Yuri had to eject from his Vostok 1 spacecraft at over 15,000 feet. And instead of an aircraft carrier, on landing Yuri was greeted by an old woman, her granddaughter and her cow. But once the Soviet leadership was certain he had survived he became a prop in the propaganda wars. And like Alan Shepherd, America’s fist man in space, Yuri longed to fly again, this time to the moon. He was trying to get there, when he died.
*
The Soviet leadership showered him with medals and awards. He was made a deputy to the Supreme Soviet, the rubber stamp congress. But all the glittering medals soon grew dull and he was allowed to return to Star City, the home of all Cosmonauts, in the Moscow suburbs. But he was not allowed another space mission. He worked on spacecraft design, and was eventually promoted to the rank of a full Colonel. He became deputy training director for the cosmonaut corps, and in 1968 he began the process to re-qualify as a fighter pilot, perhaps as his first step back to flight status.
*
On January 10, 1968 the U.S. lost its 10,000th military airplane over Vietnam. The average income in the U.S. was up to $7,850 a year, and gasoline was up to 34 cents a gallon. On January 23rd, North Korean naval boats captured the US Intelligence ship, the USS Pueblo, and its 83 man crew. On January 31, 70,000 North Vietnamese troops launched the Tet offensive by briefly capturing the U.S. embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam, and during just the second week of February the United States suffered 543 dead and 2,547 wounded in Vietnam; for that week alone. And on March 27 at 10:17 AM Yuri Gagarin climbed into the front cockpit of a MIG-15UTI trainer with Colonel Vladimir Seryogin in the rear seat. On takeoff they pushed the throttles to 9,000 rpm’s and headed for Kirzhach, 30 miles to the Northwest of Moscow.
*
The weather was horrible, and a heavily overcast quickly enveloped the Korean War era fighter/trainer. The Mig 15 was small by modern standards, just 33 feet long, with a 35 ft. swept back wing span. It was capable of well over 600mph and had a ceiling of over 50,000 feet. But the “Babouskha” (grandmother) also had a tenancy to stall and go into a tight spin at anything under 160 mph. In fact, according to one pilot who recently flew a similar two seat Mig 15UTI trainer, “Turning at that speed could be a delicate exercise, and inadvisable at low altitude. The Mig didn’t seem to care for doing anything under 250 knots.”
*
Minutes after take off Seryogin requested permission to alter course. It was granted. But those were the last words heard from the aircraft. Fellow Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov was flying a helicopter in the area and he heard two loud booms. An investigation reported that a Sukhoi 11 was also in the area, also in the overcast, and had gone supersonic. That would have accounted for the first boom Leonov heard. The second was probably Gagarin’s Mig slamming into the ground. So great was the impact that no human remains could be positively identified. The plane’s clock was stopped at 10.31 AM. Yuri Gagarin was only 34 years old. He left behind a widow and twin daughters.
*
Two hundred officers and technicians conducted a thorough investigation. But because of the Soviet obsession with secrecy the report on the crash was never released to the public. And so rumors filled the void. Rumor said the pilots must have been drunk, the plane must have been sabotaged by a jealous superior, the parachute cords were cut and the ejection seats were disconnected, the plane had hit a weather balloon or a bird or someone had forgotten to close a vent or the Mig had been caught the turbulence of another aircraft. There are a hundred theories, and you can argue that, like the Kennedy assignation theories, an open investigation would never have refuted them all. And given the provable conspiracies that governed the Soviet Union for most of the 20th century, it will likely never be possible to say with any absolute certainty why Yuri Gagarin died. But there does seem to be a most likely sequence of events.
*
The SU-11 had been intended as an all weather interceptor, and was capable of almost twice the speed of sound. But the Soviet design bureau considered it a failure, and it was no longer in production. The most likely assumption is that the Sukhoi pilot was disoriented by the dense overcast and was lower than he thought when he lit his afterburners. The radar system that was supposed to provide altitude information to all pilots in the area was out of order for the day. So the SU-11 might have roared past within 2-300 feet of Gagarin and Seryogin’s jet, maybe even closer. The turbulence produced by the SU-11 would have robbed the wings on the smaller Mig-15 of their lift, particularly if it was flying slower than 160 mph, and dropped it into a flat spin. In the overcast, whoever was piloting the Mig would have unable to orient himself before impact in the trees. If either plane had taken off a minute sooner or later they would have never come close to each other. So the death of Yuri Gagarin was most likely a combination of unlikely events; a bad day for a radar system to be down, a bad day to fly, a nasty combination of flight characteristics and some very bad timing. Combat pilots like Yuri call such combinations of unlikely events just plain bad luck.

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TILL DEATH DO US PART

I blame the Romans for what happened in New Hampshire last September, and the nearly fatal disaster last weekend at Dante’s in Queens, and, in fact, for all of the shattered expectations and bruised hearts and broken knuckles over the last 3,000 years. True, it was the ancient Egyptians who invented the wedding feast, with the music and the dancing and the drinking, and it was the Greeks who used to chant a prayer to the Goddess Hera as the wedding party left for their honeymoon; “Ho, Hymen! Ho, Hymen! Hymen Alous! Ho!” And that is not a prayer designed to lower expectations. But it was the Romans who put it all together into a full day potent with rising tensions, distant relations, recriminations, pretensions and hypertension that, by evening, whips everybody, including the bride and groom, into a frenzied drunken breakdown of all civilized behavior. This is the joining of man and women in holy matrimony. And you should always remember that the word woman comes down to us from the old German “yifmann” meaning a wife, and the old Norse “hus” (meaning a house) and “buandi” (meaning to dwell in) being the schmuck that she marries, from the Old French “maritus” (meaning to be martyred). Allow me to give you an example or two from recent history.
*
We will begin just after midnight on Sunday, September 9, 2007, in the small village of Hampstead, New Hampshire (population 8,297). A 911 call of a man stabbed drew the police to the Granite Rose Function Hall at the top of Garland Drive. There officials found between 50 and 100 members of a wedding party whaling away on each other in the front parking lot. Having a small police department (their annual budget is barely half a million dollars), Hampstead called on neighboring communities for assistance: Sandown, Danville, Fremont, Kingston, Newton, Brentwood, Plaistow, Atkinson, Salem, Derry, and the State Police. Once all 30 officers were in place they charged into the melee. They found no one stabbed, and only one individual injured seriously enough to be taken to Parkland Medical Center in Derry for treatment. But the police did find lots of black eyes, cuts, bruises, scrapped knuckles and busted lips. The cops did not find out who or what started the fight, and, frankly, once it was over they didn’t care. By 3AM the parking lot had been cleared, and another young couple had gotten a cheerful start to their new lives, with the loving support of their families. John Gotti would have been proud.
*
Not long after things calmed down in Hampstead, they started heating up in nearby Salem. Officer Jim Fox was were called to Margarita’s on Keewaydin Drive. The restaurant and bar was jammed with another wedding party, with a large group waiting outside because of capacity limits. According to the staff 34 year old Terry Eaton took offense when the bartender cut off his alcohol supply. Working his way through the crowd, Officer Fox confronted Mr. Eaton and asked him to step outside to discuss the situation. Mr. Eaton became physical and Officer Fox was forced to Taser him. As he was handcuffing the stunned man, a drunken woman leapt onto the policeman’s back and began to scratch him. Officer Fox was able to dislodge her, but she then disappeared into the drunken rowdy crowd. Then, as Fox was leaving the restaurant with his “perp” he ran into the angry crowd outside and decided he ought to call for backup.
*
Four New Hampshire State Troopers, two officers from Windham and one from Pelham responded and with Officer Fox quickly brought the crowd under control. And, then, just when it looked like things were about to calm down for the night, a bus carrying one of the warring factions from the rumble at the Granite Rose pulled up at a neighboring hotel, and Salem police were forced to roll out yet again in response to noise complaints. Still, the evening ended with only Mr. Eaton under arrest, but he made up for lack of support by trying to kick Officer Fox during booking procedures. Eaton was charged with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and two counts of assault on a police officer. He posted $5,000 bond and was out of jail by Tuesday afternoon. It must be every bride’s dream to have their dream day celebrated in such a gay family fashion.
*
The Online Etymology dictionary tells us that the word bride comes from the Old English “bryd” or “bruthiz” meaning “a woman being married”, while “bridegroom” comes from the Old English “brydgruma” meaning “suitor”. And this week, a wedding party in Vallejo, California got so out of hand that police arrested both the bryd and the bruthoz. The second time the cops were called to the party they Tasered and arrested the bridegroom and his cousin, (from the French word “couisner” meaning a relative who encourages you to get plastered and act like a jackass), for resisting arrest and the bride for public intoxication. Or I could tell you about Kevin White of Chicago who traveled to Cincinnati to marry Jetaun Wilson. Problems arose however when Kevin decided to raise a little cash for the honeymoon and is now under arrest, charged with possession of heroin with a street value of $200,000, driving with a suspended license and running a red light. (Why do people carrying drugs always break the traffic laws?) The bride is also under arrest and charged with “permitting drug abuse”, and the wedding is on hold until they can come up with $510,000 in bail; ten grand for Jetaun and half a million for Kevin.
*
But I don’t want to give you the impression that all weddings end up in jail. Sometimes they just end up in the hospital. This past weekend 22 year old Sharon Strack was finally married to her longtime boyfriend, 28 year old George Quenneville, at Dante’s Catering Center, “…a family owned establishment with over 35 years of experience” located at the corner of 75th Street and 31st Avenue in Queens, New York. As the company tag line promises, “Share your dreams with Dante…They’ll make them come true.” But what came true for Sharon and George had a little too much in common with Dante’s Inferno. The actual ceremony went fine, at least until the happy couple was about to cut the cake. Then, according to Sharon, “…all of a sudden his mom went down.”
*
The groom, who had stepped out for a cigarette, was notified by his new brother-in-law that “Your mother is down.” (They make her sound like a horse.) He rushed back inside. A few minutes later Sharon’s sister passed out in a bathroom. Other revelers became dizzy, complained of headaches and began vomiting. The staff of Dante’s called the fire department, and they found the hall had filled with carbon monoxide from a faulty dryer in the basement. George’s mom had to be treated in a hyperbolic chamber to force the odorless gas out of her tissues, and the newlywed couple’s 2 year old daughter had to be kept on oxygen for three hours. All told 38 members of the party had to be treated at hospitals. The bride, still dressed in white gown, tiara and oxygen mask, also took a ride in an ambulance. The next morning Sharon could afford to be philosophical. “They say everything’s going to go wrong on your wedding day. But…my whole wedding party was in the hospital!”
*
As to be expected the New York Tabloids had a field day. The Daily News labeled Sharon “The Bad Luck Bride”, and headlined the story, “Bride Fumes Over Gas. Spent Wedding Night in Hospital”. And the Post went with “Fume Doom for Honeymoon”. The owner of Dante’s promised to install carbon monoxide detectors and reimburse the customers. He even offered to throw another party for Sharon and George, free of charge. But Sharon said she really didn’t want to go through it all again, taking Dante’s at their promise that a wedding held there would be a “…once in a lifetime experience.”

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READING IS NOT DEAD, IT'S JUST SICK

I believe it was parapsychologist, scientist and Ghostbuster Dr. Egon Spengler who pointed out in 1984 that “Print is dead.” But I still read all the time: poems, books, magazines, assembly instructions, photo captions, the credits at the end of movies and the underside of toothpaste tubes. The only thing I won’t read is “graphic novels”. I’m sure they are a valid art form but I simply refuse to read a comic book that takes itself that damn seriously.
*
I read fiction and non-fiction, short stories, novellas, novels, and blurbs. I have read “Moby Dick” (the whale did it), and “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (The Christians did it), and I have even read Ernst Hemingway’s unnamed shortest short story ever written. It is, in its entirety – “For sale, one pair of baby shoes, never worn”. And if that doesn’t convince you that Hemingway was a genius you simply have no heart or imagination. But I confess I am not tempted to read “I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen”, by Jasper McCutcheon. It’s a real book, published by Nazca Plains Corporation, and it is followed by Mr. McCutcheon’s next great tome, “Go Ahead, Woman, Do Your Worst! Erotic Tales of Heroes Chained”. I doubt that the hero of Mr. McCutcheon’s two works, Captain Henry Mitchell, is even a distant relation to Hercules, chained or unchained. And thus, I have no interest in his adventures. The hallmark of all true literature is continuity. And some snob appeal.
*
The “…Pygmy Love Queen” was the runner up in the 30th annual “Diagram Prize”, awarded by “The Bookseller”, first a magazine and now a web site, dedicated to all things about the book industry: and yes, it is still an industry, mostly held together these days with glue and staples and Harry Potter editions, but still strong enough to include such diverse titles as, “Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice” (1978) and "The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History, and Its Role in the World Today "(1984). Both of those were previous Diagram award winners.
*
This year’s winner was "If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start with Your Legs", written by Mr. Big Boom Freeman (notice the lack of parentheses). The publisher describes it as “…a self help book for women written by a man”, and, says The Bookseller, “So effective is the title that you don’t even need to read the book itself”. Still, one reader suggested the book might be useful only “If you were Whitney (Huston), and you were dating Bobby (Brown)” As for myself, I would simply label this as a self-help book for the illiterate, written by one of their own. But let Mr. Big Boom justify his no doubt healthy advance from Simon & Schuster in his own words. “Since what I used to do didn’t work, I asked God to help me determine what I could do for him since nothing detrimental happened to me when I was being deceptive and doing wrong in my life. The Holy Spirit revealed to me that God saved me for this journey I am now embarking on. Since I am a bodyguard for the stars by trade, I have decided to protect the ones (women) I’ve been hurting. So now people can just call me “Boom, the Bodyguard for Women’s Hearts.” It brings tears to your eyes, doesn’t it? It sure as hell did to mine.
*
But my own pick for worst (meaning the best) title would have been ‘the writing guide to end all writing guides”, "How To Write “How To” Books & Articles. Cash in on your hobbies, interests and activities by letting others in on what you know". The book was unofficially awarded third place in the Diagram prize, but to the author, Brian Piddock, that was “…an insult…. My book is not odd. It is perfectly sensible. It is the most sensible writers’ manual ever published…In fact it is entirely and utterly lacking in oddness.” He is so unabashed in his outrage that it almost seems petty to point out he was actually awarded third Place, and was not the winner. But, as his website proclaims, “Remember: he’s only there to help you help yourself”. (info@brianpiddock.co.uk)
*
(However, I must admit to some suspicions concerning Mr. Piddock. His web site includes a review of his book (“Piddock’s stories of past girlfriends, present friends, and his tragic marriage are riveting.) written by Mr. Bernard Pollack. And there is also a blurb from the “Association of British ‘How To Write’ Writers” (“The story of his rivalry with a fellow How To Write writer, which led to a major miscarriage of British ‘justice’, still haunts me. Surely the best book ever written. Everyone else, stop writing now. There’s no point. Brian’s said it all) supposedly written by Mr. Paddy Brinnock. But Google can find no such British ‘How To’ association. It also occurs to me that Mr Piddock, Mr. Pollack and Mr. Brinnock have very similar names, and after several hours of intensive labor over their anagrams I can now state that Mr. Brian Piddock is in actual fact Mr. Bandy Porn Dick.)
*
The Diagram prize, based on the mythical book “A Diagram of Diagrams”, has been awarded since 1978, (“…Nude Mice”), and has included such classics of designation nomenclature as the 1986 classic, "Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality" by Glenn C. Ellenbogen. The 1990’s were kicked off by Pat Califa’s guide "Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual", 92’s "How to Avoid Huge Ships", by Captain John W. Timmer, and the 1996 classic of obscura "Greek Rural Postmen and their Cancellation Numbers", and finished off with the mass market classic, "The Joy of Sex, the Pocket Edition" in 1997. The new millennium saw "The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories" in 2003, and in 2005 "People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It" by Gary Leon Hill.
*
This last tome violates one of the unstated conventions of the Diagram prize in that it is based on the conceit that “members of the psychiatric community are capable of laughter.” A true Diagram winner should be, in my opinion, honestly loony and sincerely believe in the validity of its premises, such as previous years’ runner ups, "Tattoed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Baghestan", and "Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium", and this year’s runner up, "Cheese Problems Solved" edited by P.L.H. McSweeney, and described as marketed for “…the dedicated cheese enthusiast, this $250 guide promises to answer 200 or so of the most commonly asked questions about cheese…” I can’t even think of 200 questions about cheese, let alone be interested in the answers!
*
The publicity surrounding this year’s prize has, of course, a mercenary point. The Diagram Prize has a book in the pipeline, to be titled "How to Avoid Huge Ships and Other Implausibly Titled Books" to be published in September. Such notoriety is an impressive achievement for a prize awarded by something less than 8,500 votes world wide, and that reveals one of the underlying truths about publishing; writing about books is mostly simple plagiarism.

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