MARY DOWSER KIDNAPPED

 

The unfailingly fragrant Mary Dowser has been kidnapped by unknown agents outside her 4 star hotel in Kiev. Witnesses say her companion was knocked to the ground and Ms. Dowser was tossed into a Mercedes sedan by two men wearing clown masks. The vehicle made a quick getaway down Alla Tarasova Street. To date no ransom demands have surfaced. TVFP will keep you posted as this drama unfolds.

Prior to her kidnapping Ms. Dowser filed the following  two dispatches with TVFP. She writes to us:

Dispatch # 1

Let’s imagine you and I have taken the train from Paris. There is one final question that must be asked. But first, we leave on a grey cold day in June from Gare de Nord. We find ourselves on opposite sides of a compartment. I smell of Marlboros. I am half asleep reeking of German beer and cognac after a grand send off at the Brassierie de Ile du Saint Louis from my comrades and associates. You seem a little disdainful of my appearance. I manage a bleak smile. You retreat behind a newspaper. I scratch around in my bag for an ibuprofen. I fall asleep. When I wake up I find that you are resting with your head against the window nestled in a rolled up Burberry. You have taken off your unfashionable shoes. In fact I cannot help but notice that everything about you is unfashionable. You are snoring ever so gently. It is night. I look at my reflection in the window. Gaunt, haunted, melancholy visage. You stir and then suddenly your eyes open and you sit up quickly and we find ourselves looking into each other’s eyes. Pardon, je m’excuse, I say and look away. You give me a searching look and then reach in your suit coat pocket a take out a pack of Gauloises. L’exterior, mademoiselle, you say and tilt your head towards the sliding door of our compartment. This is where it happens, as cold moon light surrenders everything to the fierce dawn.

Dispatch #2

Mary Dowser on Euro 2012: A Fut-bol Tournament with Some History

My companion and I have made it to Kiev. Our four star accommodation is disgusting. The towels are dirty. The hotel staff smell of booze and marijuana. In the morning there was a pool of vomit outside our door. It was still there when we returned from breakfast. The people here are brutish. Neo Nazi Skinhead rule the streets.

What is also interesting about this fut-bol tournament is that at one time or another most of these nations were trying to kill each other or themselves. They were all pretty good at it. If they couldn't find a countryman to kill or a nearby country they went to Africa and killed Africans or Asia and killed anybody who didn't look like them.

As well as being a terrific fut-bol tournament Euro 2012 also features several countries that are in the midst of bailing out their incompetent greed driven bankers, politicians and business class. Ireland is bankrupt. Greece is bankrupt, except in Greece the bankers were the good guys. It was the petty bourgeois class who dodged their taxes and a government of sycophants who wouldn’t collect the taxes and cooked the books to get into the EU. Let’s see Spain is bankrupt. Portugal is almost bankrupt. Italy is on the verge. Oh and who’s running Europe right now? You guessed it, the guys who coined the phrase: Arbeit Macht Frei.

A note to my friends in Parkdale. My companion, a shy, affable Irishman from Dublin, who speaks perfect French, is Samuel Beckett. He is currently working on a French / Celtic fusion cookbook with the working title PLUS CA CHANGE / plus c'est la même chose / Potato Recipes for Every Occasion. His opinion of the Euro fut-bol tournament is that it is a parable. A house in the neighbourhood is on fire and instead of putting out the fire that will soon engulf them the neighbours are all glued to the televisions in search of glory, some, any proof that their petty, selfish lives have meaning when the true meaning of life and success is the neighbourhood. He also told me this charming joke which I now pass along to you.

 

An Irishman comes home and finds his wife in bed with an EU bureaucrat. The Irishman goes to the closet and takes out a revolver and points it at his head. His wife breaks out laughing. The Irishman glares at her and shouts, don’t laugh, you’re next.

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Jim Read

Radical Golf for Beginners

 

The Parkdale Liberation Front’s Radical Golf for Beginners
 

Jean Paul Sartre, the famous existential philosopher and Kermit the Frog look-a-like once said: Hell is other people. For the golf enthusiast: Hell is other golfers.

One of the most prevalent obstacles to enjoyment of golf is slow play. Lorne Rubenstein, the golf guy over at the Globe and Mail has written eloquently on this nastiness.

Not so long ago we played a round at a public course. Ahead of us were foursome, only one of whom appeared to have learned the game. We thought, we’ll just play through. It didn’t happen because the group ahead of us picked and dropped errant balls on the fairway. They played a game that matched their abilities. I bet they had a fair amount of enjoyment in their round. Kudos to them.

Jack Nicklaus has a radical idea: stop building eighteen hole golf courses. Instead build twelve hole courses. There is some historical basis for this. After the battle of the Plains of Abraham beneath the walls of Quebec City the British turned the field into an eleven hole golf course. We think the idea has merit. It takes up less space, costs less to maintain, has less impact on the environment and takes less time to play. That is providing you don’t have to deal with the menace of slow players.

A nine hole round is a nice way to spend a couple of hours. We like to play nine as it fits in with our busy schedule, that is unless we run into slow play. Nine or eighteen though you need to prepare yourself before venturing into the murky world of gold merchandising. After all you are going to need some clubs and balls, a golf glove, a bag to cart everything around in. Not to mention shoes, pants, matching tops and hats and so on. Remember golf is a multi-billion dollar exercise in commodity fetishism.

What do you really need to play a game of golf? We advocate the use of four to five clubs at most. A fairway wood, a hybrid or rescue club, a mid range iron, a gap wedge and a putter. You will become more familiar with your clubs more quickly to fewer you have to learn to hit. You need a glove. You don't need shoes. A good pair of sneakers will do.

We advocate that you take some lessons from a CPGA pro. These men and women will give you a solid framework to help you master a simple swing that will put the ball in the fairway, on the green and in the hole.

But is it enough. Well think of it this way. The golf industry has managed to brainwash us pretty well. You have to play eighteen holes. You have to have twelve or fifteen clubs in your bag.  You have to dress the part. You have to carry a scorecard. You have to  .  .  .  .  Well no you don’t.

Let’s say the object of the game isn’t win but to enjoy shot making. As anybody knows who has ever played the game a perfect shot is its own reward. Each hole is an adventure. You begin with your fairway wood off the tee. You don’t hit it far but you hit it reasonably straight. The main thing is that you are in the fairway or the first cut of rough. Now you hit your middle iron. Chances are using the middle iron again or your gap wedge you next shot will put you on the green. Then you are one putting for par, two putting for bogie.

For the beginning golfer who wants to keep score achieving a round of bogie golf is an awesome achievement.

But who says you have to keep score. We don’t. If you don't keep score is it still a game?

Robin Williams on the History of Golf. Warning to children this link contains the words fuck, fucking and fucked up. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwzFagy7i3E

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The Limerick

In the opinion of no less an authority than George Bernard Shaw, a Limerick is innately obscene. A Limerick that isn’t properly rude isn’t really a Limerick.

The limerick packs laughs anatomical

In space that is quite economical.

But the good ones I've seen

So seldom are clean

And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

With that in mind TVFP has gathered together a few of our favourites for your enjoyment. Parental warning: you may want to ask the children to go and smoke their pot in the other room.

*

The limerick’s callous and crude

It’s morals distressingly lewd

It’s not worth the reading

By persons of breeding

It’s designed for us vulgar and rude

From what we can tell Limericks, with some notable exceptions, were written by the dispossessed. The writers were almost always men. Often as not the object of their deprecations were minorities, mostly women and homosexuals.  Most of these limericks are anything but funny, but rather reflect times of poverty and in some cases genocide by starvation, a soaring infant mortality rate, class and gender conflict, war and political frustration.

Having said that we find it difficult to dismiss the Limerick on grounds of political and social correctness. The Limerick would only laugh at us and would write a scathing five liner about the size of our penis or would endeavor to insert some article of commodity fetishism in our anus. The Limerick by its nature is defiant of any attempt to cleanse its anarchic soul. In truth that is why at we at TVFP are so fond of it.

Some of these limericks have been adapted by TVFP to reflect modern concerns. The rest are what they are.

*

Some time back there was a bombshell

Light Rail Transit might start to do well

Now that could cost loads

To the selfish who build the roads

So they brought in an exhaust hole from hell

*

Have the treasures of our land in thrall

Any chance of survival at all

With a dope like Kent to trust

It looks like a bust

And the Harper we know is a know-it-all

*

The thing about ‘Back to Basics’

And similar high moral tricks

Is they’re bound to backfire

When your Conservative choir

Have all got their brains in their dicks

*

A mathematician named Hall

Has a hexahedronical ball

And the cube of its weight

Times his pecker plus eight

Is his cell number – give him a call

*

There once was a young lady with such graces

That her curves cried out for embraces

You look, said McGee

Like a million to me

Invested in all the right places

*

An astronomer, pious but odd

To be honest a dirty old sod

Who’d searched for a sign

Of the presence divine

Cried, I’ve just found Uranus, dear God

*

Her husband is in the Hussars

A colonel all covered in scars

But it isn’t his weals

For which nightly she feels

But the privates he lost in the wars

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Margaret Mary Read 1922 - 2012

Mom

So I get the call on Thursday, May 17th,  around 11:30. I’m at Big Mama. That is the fountain at Queen and University in downtown Toronto. It’s a monument to the Boer War.  Mom has died. Well you know 75 yrs of a pack a day you know she wasn’t going to live for ever. Still it came as a shock. My brother-in-law Tom commented maybe don’t say anything about Mom being 90 yrs old she could end up a poster girl for Benson and Hedges Light.

Tom picks me up right away and we go out there. Hilary and Pamela were there as Mom died and they each held a hand as the life force went out of her. As traumatic as that may have been for them I believe that Mom’s journey to the other side was made so much easier by the loving presence of my sisters.

The origins of funeral practices are lost in time and yet funerals are universal. If they are universal they are also local. We are here in Oakville not to bury Mom in any ground or to fling her into a wind but to place her where she belongs, in our hearts. Can we do this? Let the memory of my beautiful Mother be a seed for you and me, for us today.

Welcome to Margaret Mary Tait’s memorial service. Margaret Mary Read’s memorial service. Peg from the Peg. The Peggy of our childhood. Our Mom of the many names.

The Reverend Canon Darcy Lazerte has been so kind to attend and to help us remember and celebrate Mom. We, as a family, are most appreciative of his presence. He was there with Dad and he is here with us now.

I think if you want to know about my Mom you need to know that she was the daughter of Andrew Tait, my grandfather, an electrician for the CNR, a participant in the Great Winnipeg Strike of 1919 when a police force rode down a peaceful assembly of workers, many of them combat veterans, as was my grandfather. He was a soldier who wrote poetry and who wrote In The Cold Grey Dawn, Vimy Ridge. I’ve chosen this poem from Mom’s Dad my grandfather as a tribute to his daughter Margaret Mary and to pay tribute to the passing of the generations as we are seeing here with Mom.

In the cold grey dawn of an April morn

When the clouds were hanging low

We mustered for the great attack

In a trench bedecked with snow

     Our thoughts were for our loved ones

     As the last few moments sped

     We knew that many of us

     Would be numbered with the dead

     A mine went up before us

     Our gunners made reply

     We scrambled quickly o’er the top

     To win the day or die

In the clear still light

When the fight was fought and won

We waited in a broken trench

The shrapnel broke around us

We cared not for the storm

We only looked in sorrow for the

Comrades who were gone.

Mom, my dearest, sweetest comrade is gone.

Margaret Mary was Peg or Peggy when we were growing up. Peggy was something. She was as vivacious as she was beautiful. When the boys came home she was a big hit at the dance hall socials they held in those days. It is no wonder she put the spell on a handsome skinny RCAF flight lieutenant who later on became our father.

Both Mom and Dad ended up poor after the depression and a lot of what they achieved in their marriage and as individuals was to ensure that the kids wouldn’t have to experience the tough times they went through. Important as it is, they didn’t just teach us to be financially responsible.

Mom taught us a lot important things. She taught us to be polite and considerate. She taught us to be respectful of other people. Together my Mother and Father taught us that it isn’t what you have that defines you, it is who you are that is the measure of what you have. Move to the back of the bus, give up a seat for someone with a physical challenge, hold a door for someone, male or female, smile and look someone in the eye and say hello.

You know if there are errors and omissions in my life I take full responsibility.

At some point, sometime in the mid eighties Mom morphed from Peggy into Margaret. By the time of her second job we’d all flown the coup and so it made sense for her to get out and do something. As a historical note her first job was with the railroad and they let her go when the boys came home. So now she was working again a, part time at job across from the Eaton’s Centre.

So Peggy became Margaret but she was always our Mom. 

It is hard to put into words what my Mother has meant to me in my life. My Mom is still my Mom and she is my Mom from here and now until I die. She is the Queen who rules my heart and it is she, along with my son Louis and my sisters Hilary and Pamela and my brother-in-law Tom and my dear relatives and friends who share so deeply in the measure of goodness I have in my heart.

Having said that, I do have one small complaint. It may come as a surprise to those of you who knew her, but Mom had her, I’m not saying flaws, but maybe areas of enthusiasm that I didn’t exactly agree with, you know as an eight year old kid. Mom once washed my mouth out with soap. Shocking, I know. In fairness to Mom it was the fifties. Well after a munch on the bar of soap I promised I would never ever say that word again as long as I lived in my life. Man that was awful. What could that terrible word have been that I needed to chew on a bar of soap? Is George Carlin in the audience?

Well, on the other hand to be fair to Mom I was wild back then, roaming the alleys of Winnipeg and the death defying monkey trails along the Assiniboine River. I knew no fear. I was indestructible. I was going to live forever and so was my Mom. I guess I was a handful. But Mom was cool. Totally cool.

Mom’s deal was, Jimmie, if I was in her good books, or James Andrew if I was about to be passed on to a higher authority, Jimmie she would say, do your chores, show up for dinner on time and don’t bug me while I’m listening to baseball on the radio.

It was a good deal. It was a sweet deal. That was Mom.

The Mary Dowser School of Business Education

The Mary Dowser School of Business Education

The View From Parkdale is proud to announce that Championship Typist and World Traveller the ever fragrant Mary Dowser will be opening a virtual school of business education. As you know Ms. Dowser has interviewed Che Guevara during his vacation from Hell. She has also liaisoned with Hugh Firmin, the Consul’s brother-in-law in the Malcolm Lowry novel Under the Volcano. Ms. Dowser has corresponded with the Chiapan Zapatista rebel, subcommandante Marcos. Ms. Dowser, as you can see from her previous correspondence with TVFP, has spent time on an Irish coffin ship during the horrific British genocide. She has hob-knobbed with the ancient Gods of our native peoples, including Great Manitou and Quetzachoatl. She has also spent time with the Mexican magician Don Juan in both his human and jaguar form.

TVFP is pleased to present a selection Mary Dowser's upcoming virtual course offerings:

Investment Mgmt 101: Toilet training for Investment Bankers

Investment Mgmt: 102: Why pinch a penny when you can pinch someone’s life savings

Marketing: 101: The Commodity Fetish, the genius of marketing to the gullible

Marketing: 102: Lying, the necessary virtue of high end marketing

Economics: 101: Ten secrets of the coin flip

Economics: 101: Honesty and integrity in crystal ball gazing.

Entrepreneurship: 101: The four basic principles of applied greed

Business Ethics 101: You can always fool a fool, or a sucker IS born every minute

Salesmanship: 101: How to look sincere, the 'method' approach

Labour Relations 101: Team building exercises for expendable employees

- Fees start at $500 per course. 

- Financial experts, including bankers, accountants, insurance salesmen, must pay the full course amount prior to enrollment.

- Applicants possessing a university degree may be required to take a remedial English grammar and spelling course.

- Books, scribblers and pencil cases are extra.

- Financial assistance is available at current credit card interest rates, approx. 20% per annum. If an applicant is employed by a retail establishment interest rates are 30% per annum.

 - There are no refunds.

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The Parkdale Liberation Front Presents: Infant Mortality Rates: Running the Numbers

Infant Mortality Rates: Running the Numbers

The World Health Organization on Infant Mortality

Neonatal deaths account for a large proportion of child deaths. Mortality during the neonatal period is considered a good indicator of both maternal and newborn health and care.

(The Infant Mortality rate is the) number of deaths during the first 28 completed days of life per 1,000 live births in a given year or period.

Queen Victoria on the Toronto Maple Leafs

 

I rather like croquette. My husband Albert and I, when we weren’t engaged in fornication  and cheering the nation on in its heroic effort to civilize the lazy and indifferent wog, used to play it often on the green lawns of Balmoral. It was jolly good fun. Croquette is the ideal game.  It embodies the triune ideal of sport; skill, fair play and determination.

We play a great deal of croquette in Heaven. The Presbyterians seem to like it a lot, although they have their own lawns, as do the Episcopalians. We Anglicans, as is to be expected, are the elite of the croquette pitch. There are certainly no head shots. Almost all of the participants are in possession of their teeth. There is no foul body odour and certainly no foul language. Rude gestures are prohibited. There is no spitting or violent evacuation of the nasal cavity. Winners and losers alike share the special joy of eager combatants who understand that to compete as gentlemen and ladies is the highest reward that sport has to offer.

I rather think we need to step back. This obsession with the Toronto Maple Leafs seems rather to verge on a grammatical absurdity. We are in favour of renaming the team the Toronto Maple Leaves.

Having said that, viewed even from a great distance (Heaven is several light years away) Canada is a rather large country. Surely there is plenty of room for more croquette. Surely in these vast wastelands Canadians, though a joyless and dull race, can find a sunny level field and there plant a pleasant green lawn and engage happily in sport as sport was meant to be played. Afterwards perhaps you can repair to a quiet and peaceful chapel and give thanks to God you were not born Irish.

As you well know the Irish are a despicable race. The highways and byways of Hell are simply thronging with the filthy sods. The Irish play something called hurling. It resembles ice hockey except that it is played on a cow pasture amongst the steaming turds. I can assure you it is a thoroughly debased sport suitable only for the congenitally stupid and insane. That pretty much sums up the Irish.

Rule the Maple Leafs

(Sung to the tune of Rule Britannia)

O Rule the Maple Leafs

O rule the shimmering rink

Alas the Maple Leafs are lousy

O Man oh man they really stink

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Jim Read's Short Stories