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11 11 03

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From the Envelope of Tiny Ideas

By Andrei Codrescu

1. A German company is making calf implants for stick-legged men wearing lederhosen and is hoping to butt in on Scotland's kilt-wearers. The implants are worn inside socks. Columnist-value: close to zero. The only man I've lately seen wearing a skirt in New Orleans was J., proposing marriage to my friend A. at the opening of a new gallery of Spooky Art in the Bywater, and he was wearing a long skirt, making it impossible to tell if he needed calf implants or not. This isn't proof that American men don't have skinny legs, I just can't confirm it. A. said yes.

2. String Theory posits 12 dimensions. I'm pretty cool with two, then I walked into a half-open door and I was convinced of the third. The Gold Mine Saloon on Dauphine has several more. Time, certainly, because I don't know where six hours went after a mob of poets created a pre-Halloween chaos accelerator that still has me counting all my fingers. They've also got an energy-vortex that functions on a mysterious principle, like a popcorn machine. Here is the patent filed by the proprietor, Dave Brinks: "somewhere between caveman and quantum physics/your heart is the basic thing."

3. Chiming Feathers is dancing tonight at the Gold Club in Baton Rouge. This is really of no interest to anybody since "tonight" is one week past by the time you read these words. Columnist value: less than zero.

4. Misheard: "The body's just another word for what you have to lose." Also related, an ad: "Your liver is evil. You must punish it." This last one has several columns by Cal Thomas in it.

5. Flash-news: a millionaire has acquired 10 former missile sites in the Badlands, to develop poet cemeteries in the deep underground silos. At the very bottom of each one is a library and, as one looks up, the poets' profiles carved on their trays look down and guffaw. I know that's not funny, but somebody has to have a plan. Let's hear it for the millionaire: he's from the eighth dimension.

6. Reality check: the Coalition of the Willing has become the Chorus of the Damned in Iraq, and the once-embedded have fled, hoping to stay embodied. Regime-change is not regimen-change. We are getting fat on a steady diet of official malarkey. This synthesizes 6,000 acres of recent and future newsprint.

7. Happy ending: The best name for a new publication: "Wild Strawberries." The editor, Utahna Faith, hopes that the phrase "wild strawberries" will replace common transitions such as "you know," "well," and "as I was saying." For instance, "I was looking at the text with my eyes but, wild strawberries, I had no idea that, wild strawberries, we were flying, wild strawberries." It works for some columnists.