estamos muy bien, gracias!

there are many cooks working on this porridge. even more, if you count the voices in our heads.

there is a place called show low, arizona. it was once smaller (pop. ca. 1,200), but like the rest of arizona, it's filling up with Q-tips (white-haired retirees, usually from iowa or wisconsin) who come here to die, but not before hopelessly clogging their arteries and our roadways. and our buffets, too, dammit. anyway, show low's most salient feature is the deuce of clubs -- you can hardly take two steps in show low without seeing some reference to it. it seems that in the 1800s there was a land dispute on a ranch shared by two ranchers, clark and cooley. they decided one of them had to go. but they were not barbarians. they could have settled the matter by some crueller means, such as a duel or its western analog, the gunfight. but being men of refined intellect, they agreed to draw cards. said clark to cooley, "if you can show low, you win." cooley promptly drew the deuce of clubs, lowest value card in the deck. displaying the card to clark, cooley said, "show low it is!" therefore the town is named show low, and the main drag through town is called deuce of clubs.

related side note: "deuce of clubs" used to be a boys' reformitory slang phrase meaning "to use both fists."

also a manhattan slang term for the seedy 42nd street area

marginally related side note:
snowflake, a town near show low, was not named after a snow flake, but rather after its two founders, mr. snow and mr. flake. improbable, but true. (strangely, the phone book shows few listings for snow, but plenty of flakes. best snowflake name: "Jake Flake.") we like to use snowflake as a bar bet -- it's been good for lots of drinks. (but proof is usually demanded--a book will do, but one can also call the az historical society, if one is drinking during the business hours of the day.) typically we'll offer the sucker a chance to get even, offering to bet double or nothing that show low was named after two guys, mr. show and mr. low. we've never had a taker.

even more marginal side note: snowflake has a street called full house lane. that is not a good bar bet.

(now if you want to know about a really bizarre little town, ask us about doing time in coolidge, the town featured in kathryn bigelow's cool noir vampire film Near Dark)

correctly. how do you spell it?

rms makes the shift key a pain in the wrists. we deal with the pain. you deal with the lower-case.

no.

you refer, of course, to the low-tech font at the top of this page. it is called "do not bend," was a collaborative effort between deuce of clubs and the fine folks at Cardhouse, and is available for hundreds of american dollars.

click 'em & find out.

why? think it would work?

strange life renders invention superfluous.

does it make a difference if we say yes?

you pay half now, and the rest after the hit.

that's different. contact us & we'll talk. making money's something we just don't do nearly enough of.

dead composer.

who said it did?

Can you conceive of a satisfactory answer to that question? If you think of one, fill us in, will you? then we can make a separate FAQ exclusively about wagner.

hmm ... don't know about wagner's immortality. his immorality, on the other hand, is well known. as to locating another wagner bust, iit's hit-or-miss. there is a fake wagner bust. he is thought to be evil.

we like it. in fact, wagner's on his way to your house right now to ... to ... uh, to, y'now, check things out, or something. (get out of the house! GET OUT OF THE HOUSE!)

we are asked this a lot. we are not rich. although one of our great-grandfathers did once own much of what is now wickenburg, arizona. not that that does us any damn good at this point.

'Obtiens ai demandé à ceci par sort que je ne suis pas un manuel riche bien que mon grand-grand-père ait par le passé possédé beaucoup de ce qui est maintenant wickenburg, l'Arizona pas que cela me fait bon fichu en ce moment.

"No, YOU must be Don Francisco's sister."

for food, we work as doctors. now, for rent, we make money by being lawyers. and if we want to see a movie, we have to be stockbrokers.

we lead complicated lives. and we don't go to the movies much.

all right, people, let's move ON, shall we?

if you can't make a gum wrapper ring, you're way too stupid, even for matrimony.

no. the chances are too good these days that someone will answer.

yes. yes, we did. twice. No, three times. No, four (documentation of burning man 99 to follow in due course).

did we not already cover this satisfactorily?

nuts are always finding fault with our interest in amy grant's mandible, kolob, 666 cough syrup, godfried danneels, sign person, criswell, &c. &c. &c.

NOTE: I vaguely remember in one of Streiber's books (I think it was Transformation) that a Mr. Keane (no relation to me) mentioned this heavenly language -----

streiber was probably talking about the so-called "enochian" language. don't screw with it.

as for tongues, check the used bookshops for:

• enthusiasm, by ronald knox
• the psychology of speaking in tongues, by john p. kildahl
• the modern tongues movement, by robert g. gromacki
• i once spoke in tongues, by wayne a. robinson
• war on the saints, by jesse penn-lewis

as for keane, perhaps it is the same keane who painted those big-eyed kids in the 60s & 70s.

or maybe just the goof who draws the abominable "family circus"

yes.

wagner had a reputation for having a peculiarly large head -- we're talking skull here, not ego, though that was exceptionally large, too. it isn't clear whether his head was large compared to other peoples' heads or whether it just looked large on his comparatively tiny body.

you might try asking one of the wagner societies. they live for that sort of information.

you can't afford the evaluation fee.

"highest bliss" (the final two words of tristan und isolde).

Marginally more personal questions...