for 10 December 1999. Updated every WEEKDAY.
|
|
Filler Is there a Church of Polly? After that Thanksgiving prayer, I want to join it! Truly thankful for all my sweet delusions, James T. Gibney <the_burger@ juno.com> Join us in worshiping me! Worship services begin at 8 a.m., followed by Hallelujah Polly Celebrational Feast at 2 p.m. Please bring offerings of good red wine and recipes involving liberal amounts of refined sugar. Afterwards, all the little children will come forward, and we'll have a very special moment where "Polly Talks to the Little Children." We'll probably talk about a special, magical land where the ground is covered with diamonds and rubies and all the Fudge Stripe cookies you can eat. Polly will take you there too; all you have to do is get your parents to write a great big check to the Church of Polly, made out to the "Church of All Spiritual Holiness," which you can abbreviate just by writing "CASH." Also very thankful and sweetly deluded, Polly  Polly: You wouldn't be so self-conscious if you smoked less pot and took more Prozac. Your pal, Dr. Jekkyl <trevor.coe@multex.com> Prozac isn't really my style, Jekkyl. Gotta feel that pain. That's my life, man! It's a crazy life, but it's mine, dude! That flame burns pretty hot, but hey, that's livin' on the edge, you know? Ahem. Oftentimes, self-consciousness is nurtured by surrounding yourself with self-conscious people. That's the rub — you look for friends who're a lot like you, but then one day you realize that all your worst traits are being reinforced by the people around you, because their worst traits match yours. You tell your little tales of self-consciousness, they tell their self-deprecating tales, and in the end, the one thing you're both sure of is how totally normal it is to be paralyzed by self-doubt and second-guessing. But hey, more pain, more gain, right? Hurts so good! It's a hard row to hoe but it's my hoe, dude! I mean, my row! Oops! Freudian slip, baby, yeah! Less self-conscious but more confused, Polly Subject: Happy Thanksgiving Day — Great Stuff! Polly, You are a magician with words. You abuse them in the most amusing way. A lousy life or a good imagination? Regards from an appreciative reader, Ron Williams <RonaldW@MadisonCT.com> First of all, I am not a magician with words by any stretch of the imagination, no matter how well-developed that particular stretching imagination might be. A magician with melted cheese? Maybe. Words? No way. I'm flattered, but I need to use and abuse words far, far more effectively than I do now, and you ... you need to read better books. So that's good. Now I'm insulting you for complimenting me. See how appreciation gets you nowhere? These and other very important lessons can be yours if the price is right, Polly Subject: This book sucks Hi there. I work for TV Books, a division of Broadway Video/Lorne Michels Entertainment company, which produces Saturday Night Live and Late Night with Conan O'Brien. We published Jimmy Fallon's new book in late October called I Hate this Place: The Pessimist's Guide to Life. He is a cast member on Saturday Night Live, which is featured on our Web site at http://www.tvbooks.com/ index2.html. We are distributed by HarperCollins. I am the director of sales here. Jimmy has a huge following in the college market. He'll be on Late Night with Conan O'Brien next month, and he was on Late Show with David Letterman in early November. Perhaps your Suck fans might like a book such as this, and perhaps you'd like to sell it to them through your store. Let me know if you'd like to get a copy of the book and a T-shirt. Perhaps we could do something here. Darren Elsner Director of Sales TV Books We'd love to sell this zany book of yours, but shelf space in the Suck store is at a real premium. We've got Meanie Babies and Poke Me, Mon toys out the wazoo, and when that new shipment of Fuck You Custard Pies comes in, this place is gonna look like the Harry and David warehouse ... on crack! But hey, did you know you can add "on crack" to anything and it's instantly funnier? It's the "from hell" of the late '90s! You might want to get this Jimmy guy up to speed on that one for his next major network appearance. Dropping you knowledge like it ain't no thang, Polly Director of Handling Inquiries from Directors of Sales Suck.com Holy Roll Any film that starts off saying unequivocally that God exists and that Jesus is the absolute son of God cannot, by definition, be blasphemous or antireligious. Get real. Don S <bbcrock@hotmail.com> Dear Don S (if that is your real name), Allow me to introduce you to a much-heralded but rarely utilized concept: irony, which allows that there is no such thing as an unequivocal statement. Indeed, at its most rarefied, irony holds that getting "real" is at best a momentary state to be replaced with a question of just how "real" real is. Cue — sans irony — Alan Parsons' "A Dream Within a Dream" off his super-fantastic (really!) "concept" album, Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Or was it Tales of Misery and Lack of Imagination? Mr. M Mxyzptlk, Babe, you missed the point — the first kill was the Fatted Calf (Disney), a reference to how they suck the life out of art for profit. The second wave of killing was the audience; they died for not knowing what they were facing (go ahead and watch ER forever, see if I care). God was only a plot device — like the new fall lineup, he made everything well again. I did like what you had to say. David A. Dorney <dadroc@csi.com> Disney rules and is down with the devil: Escape from Witch Mountain, The Devil and Max Devlin, The Devil in Miss Jones, etc.! More important, would you know Eric Clapton in heaven? He'd be that professorial-looking dude in the butterfingered section, hitting on goils (he'd call them birds) and rapping with Wilt the Stilt Chamberlain, the former Harlem Globetrotter who let Kansas University's long-ago shot at a national title slip through his fingers with the promiscuity he later reserved only for his Big Dipper. One small correction: God is the only plot device. Mr. M As a matter of fact, there is nothing blasphemous about mocking or subverting idols. Christians are actually supposed to do this, I think. Because they aren't pagans, right? You must be confusing the cultural phenomena known as Christianity with the actual religion. It's a short trip from "make no graven image" to "piss on graven images," isn't it? Your attempt to relate any of this to Pascal's wager was pretty unspectacular. Stick to writing about things you understand. Demmy Rooster <root@treehouse.dyndns.org> Dear Demmy, Fair enough. I get your point, though most of your message is somewhat less clear to me than the Christian meanings on Bob Dylan's Slow Train Coming LP or the Ayn Rand allusions on Rush's 2112, or, for that matter, the Poe allusions on that Alan Parsons Project record. Mr. M |
|
||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||
   |
||||||||||||||||||||
 |  |
|||||||||||||||||||
 |   | |||||||||||||||||||
![[Tim Cavanaugh]](/fish/staff/images/tim.gif)
![[Copy Edit]](/fish/staff/images/copyeditors.gif){kind=small}
![[Phillip Bailey]](/fish/staff/images/phil.gif){kind=small}
![[yes, it's
a plunger. i'll l
eave the rest up to your imagination ... ]](/fish/staff/images/erin.gif){kind=small}
![[Brian
Forsyth, " we're just spanning time "]](/fish/staff/images/brian.gif)
![[the fixin'
pixie... ]](/fish/staff/images/emily.gif)
![[Ian
Connelly]](/fish/staff/images/ian.gif){kind=small}