Review of Beyonce as a Person, by Will Gardner

Beyonce sometimes goes on the internet, born in Houston. She well wears yellow and loves her daddy so much they have the same hair color. Despite her Beyoncetiousness, she is not in Iman’s book about nutmeg and buttermilk (says Salma Hayek). But, whatever, she is not going to compromise her Christianity. Nope.

It’s hot in the Knowles cut. Curtains the size of squirrels houses. And talk about online. When she was visiting her friend in Bethesda (and she did pronounce Maryland right when she landed in Dulles), she totally ate some rondolet cheese (kind of like my friend Marylynn). She has over six rooms on the first floor itself. Kitchens don’t count. They don’t in Maryland either. But that’s aside the point cause Beyonce’s closest house to Maryland is in Texas. New York is not in the gospel enough and Miami is full of that pesky Will Smith (who was good in that black movie). She didn’t even talk to him much at the Oscars this year. But Ellen didn’t really talk to her either. Well, kind of. I think she said hi.

Yeah, totally hot. She doesn’t even need leg warmers. Sometimes she swims some in her B-sharp. And sometimes she runs a bit on those paved paths behind her toolshed. But mainly she looks good because she has to, primarily reading thick magazines and sometimes using astrigent (perhaps melting some). Her mother (who taught her how to sew and to genuflect) says she does. Her mother can’t sing like Whitney Houston’s mother can (not from Houston). But she has been nominated for BET awards for design. The black Edith Head or something.

She has other people like Linda go on the internet for her. Of course she can read, but she doesn’t like to unless she can flip (gently) the pages herself with elegance. And it is with elegance. Also a sly smile. Very important, she says. Make them think you’re a dumb blonde and then she spoils it by quoting Margaret Atwood who doesn’t even live in the us. Or Vermont, for that matter.

She and Jennifer Hudson are Virgos. But Beyonce does not have any bumper stickers on her MP3 hatchback. If she did, she has said she would have the one where it says something about no Jesus, no peace, know Jesus, know peace, visualize Jesus, visualize peace. She’s shorter than you think. Especially when she looks like she did in the black outfit in the later seen in Dreamgirls. That hat was sure period. In the cut.

Bill Condon thinks great things of her. So do you.

Will Gardner lives in Portland, Oregon.

Today and Etiquette

I. Introducing Yourself

How do you do well you do.
We despise them walking along the boardwalk four to a breast so that we are forced to say pardon. We despise this.
It will be perfectly lovely to have seen you.

II. Tea Parties

Having had tea there we chose to have a grand old memory of it.
I was Russian and I could’ve been. So remember me and treat me like that.
Treat me so. Disentangle the crusts and pass me a dainty morsel.

III. Coversation

A question is the only is only a compliment.

IV. Flattery

Flattery will get you. If the or and in the no well but if I could can you I oh the what the and if when or when and it.
Who are if I who and who we saw this and we and we did if it or we and then and then.
Yes. It and us if or and then but not if but and then if not then but if you. But if you then.
Is if a is it when when who and then and can and cannot then in or over not at all and all around us.

V. Sounds the Mouth Makes

That is the sound a mouth makes. And that it brings you here. All that is mouth-like that it swells from.
All that is friend-like is draped on our bodies if lustrous garments.
Ask me more often. Touch me more readily. More naturally we repeated those people.

Feeling etiquette problems? Email uomocontrol@gmail.com for solutions.

Best American Parade (Macy's's), by Rory Enwright

If one were to assume the weighty task of eschewing 99% of the really great parades out there to single out the best 4th of July parade in America is the America's Independence Day Parade, but not the one in your hometown. There's one main, real one in Washington D.C. which is by definition the capitol of America itself. So I think they would know.

Fact: the parade does include between 18 and twenty marching bands that is including fife and drum corps.

History: in 2006, the parade was to commence at 11:45 am sharp, and most likely it did

But: is it America's best parade… period?!

There are other parades, you've seen em. Alright. We've all been in some parades, so. Hometowns are anticipated. Macy's's one is good. There are more good ones, all really good, all the time all over this country.

Only time will tell if perennial favorite America's Independence Day Parade can withstand the challenge and get great odds to emerge… as… America's… Next Top Parade!!

So until then…..

Despite the infinite and/or very good nature of these various parades you have mulled over now, it remains, one is the best. So. Our bet:

It's Macy's's.

Rory Enwright lives in Seattle, Washington.

Backgammon Today

No Real Rift in Backgammon Community as Mangy Lion Fades Away Noisily
by Ramses

In a better world, the great game of Backgammon would guard its gates. It would allow into its fertile fields of play only those consenting sportspersons who see the game both as a catalyst for intellectual growth and an encourager of mental agility. As well, of course, as an invigorating way to spend those spare moments we all find ourselves with on bullet trains and ski gondolas. Sadly, ours is not yet a better world. How keenly I feel this now. And how pained I am to find myself in the position of having to write what I have to write here. So it is from a sense of duty that I scrape my pen across the paper of today, which is a screen, and the pen is a cursor.

But what happens to a sore left unlanced and undrained? Why it festers and reddens, like the person I’m referring to, until the dead skin is torn away and the whole mess is irrigated with a stinging rinse of honest truth and then bandaged with forgiveness. Let’s just say it plainly: A certain-undeniably-once-great backgammon columnist is putting up pointless and somewhat embarrassing resistance to an ancient fact – viz. that the old must make way for the new.

Nowhere was this maxim more in evidence than at last year’s Parliament Filters Cup in Cape Town. I’m usually impatient with the resort tourneys – or, more accurately, with the scene at the resort tourneys, i.e. entitled emphysemics in pee-stained seersucker trousers who mainline gin and jabber ceaselessly about their school ties. But as luck would have it, I had just come off a week of bow-hunting in the Transvaal, and “the Filters” was within easy reach of my fractionally-owned jet. That’s how I came to be sitting tableside in Cape Town when an easily-settled dispute (over the Crawford Rule, of all things) led to the much reported fracas, which of course devolved quickly into the incident in which I was briefly implicated.

The course of the game, of course, came as a surprise to no one. (Well, almost no one, apparently.) Was there ever any doubt that Raj Parekh, the Houdini of the Hindu Kush, would take Roderick Macintosh absolutely to pieces with his heady, relentless, post-9/11 game? Or that Parekh’s midboard acrobatics would leave the musclebound Macintosh hemorrhaging points and scrimping out pips? But who knew that the ‘dark horse’ Macintosh — flogged constantly by the pricey PR machine that only a desperate-but-still-connected sports diarist could muster — would turn out to be a dim Glaswegian the size of a horse goosing his pieces around the board with fingers like carrots? And who could have predicted the swift and public unraveling of the vanquished Roderick?

Let’s see: No. No. Me. And, oh, Me.

If there were doubt in anyone’s mind that the Macintosh has had the heavy and invisible hand of a certain once-influential columnist paving his way up the tournament ladder… well, the piece of melodrama indulged in by that that no-longer-important board-game commentator erased it. Why was a man the age of this declining scribe demanding entry to a player’s dressing room after that player had been escorted there by IBGA officials after actually upsetting the board after judges rightly ruled for Parekh in the Crawford thing?

To see, up close, the unraveling of a man is no easy hay ride in the park. Nor do I deny that Macintosh’s play had a certain savage grace that will be missed when it is fled from the scene. But his bizarre collapse and apparent psychotic break should be proof enough that players can’t be churned out of some aging hack’s backgammon factory. Just because a man “has the glutes for the endgame” — as the tired mimeographer who backs Macintosh was heard to say of his brawny protégé — does not mean that he can be made to compete at a competitive level. According to some in his retinue, a year ago Macintosh was a rage-filled sous-barista and intinerant underwear model, hustling checkers in Glasgow’s infamous local, The Gilded Filbert.

Tragically, it is Macintosh who will pay the price for the pride of his puppetmaster. The young man is reportedly a quivering husk of his former self. Whatever prospects he may have had in other areas of the sports and gaming world have been irretrievably dimmed.
(I know, I know: that may seem generous. But Macintosh might have been a great player of another game — one which rewards mulish persistence and upper body strength, like Battleship or Hungry Hungry Hippos.)

So it was concern for the welfare of a young player, as well as an abiding interest in protecting the good name and public face of backgammon that were motivating me when I placed myself in the doorway between the Main Playing Area and the West Players Lounge. As a recognized member of the fourth estate, I thought it my duty both to dispense information and, if necessary, to establish a secure perimeter. The second did indeed become necessary — what had begun as a knot of gawkers quickly grew to a stir of angry partisans and threatened to become a heedless mob. So yes I stood my ground; my arms were indeed akimbo.

The Fog of War? Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird? I don’t know, but I know that when I heard that Simon Northcote-Greene was considering charging me with elder abuse, and had in fact already involved the South African authorities, I laughed so hard I almost mis-steered my cigarette boat. Then I quit laughing, though, because the claim is also actionably libelous.

I mean really: who would want to abuse Simon Northcote-Greene? Certainly not I. My posture was entirely defensive, my maneuvers phrophylactic. Any injuries Mr. Northcote-Greene sustained opposing me would by definition be of his own doing.

Lions in the wild on TV will sometimes kill one of their own troop or whatever if he is very old and is causing a lot of trouble. Now, some in Northcote-Greene’s camp will probably take that as a threat, unaccustomed as they are to the robust idiom of virile competition. But nothing could be farther from the truth. We are more than brutes, (Mr. SNG, to be sure, is quite clearly a homo sapiens) and as any backgammoner will tell you, reason and guile will always get you farther than force. I’m just saying I saw it on TV once and I think we can learn something from animals, which, though brutish, are also noble.

Backgammon Today

Dubitable ‘Crawford Rule’ Has No Place in Tournament Play
By Simon Northcote-Green

From time to time, since my sweep of the Interlaken games, I am approached by fans and foes alike who would have my opinions of the so-called ‘Crawford Rule’. This, of course, is the controversial tenet which forbids use of the doubling cube for the first game after one player has reached a score exactly one point less than the overall match score. To all my inquisitors I tell the same thing: the George Crawford I know couldn’t tell a pip from a blot, much less enough about doubling that a hastily adopted rule might bear his moniker.

A recent game may help to illustrate my point:

It was in tournament play at Cape Town that two-time Highlands finalist Roderick ‘Roddy’ Macintosh found himself in a situation that made him feel, as he put it over drinks that evening, ‘awfy peely-wally.’ The strapping lad was nearing the bearoff phase of his second game, versus hirsute software entrepreneur Rajen Parekh, during their final match of the tournament. While the finely preened Parekh — whose major contribution to the world of table sports has been the introduction of so-called player ‘signup bonuses’ to his armada of off-shore Internet gambling sites — was left scattered across the board (including two checkers in his opponent’s house), Macintosh was in a position more suited to his humble-yet-strong nature: yet one chip on his outer board, at the 18th point; a prime of four points blocking Parekh’s stragglers, and a roll of 3-4 to bring him safely home. And I’d bet on Lord Macaulay’s grave that the young Scot might have even afforded a trip to the bar, if the Bengalese naybob had found the strength to send him there!

Naturally, Macintosh reached – as would you, Reader, or I — for the doubling cube. It was at this point that his opponent stood and called for the judge to apply the aforementioned C. Rule. Putting aside the abrupt, childish manner in which the call was sputtered – which will warrant another article altogether, on more fundamental matters of gameroom etiquette – that such a specious edict was even contemplated on such a floor as the Filters Cup was naturally enough to incite laughter from as far back as the ladies’ trough! It took some time and effort to quiet them, of course, but no sooner than that fire was doused did the ruling judge effect the weekend’s truest conflagration, with his utterly unforeseeable accession to the slinky lemur’s demand! (I use this appellation with some good will, as it is a family rumor that my paternal grandfather was once, for a few hours at Hertford, married to a small mammal of prosimian descent. The petting zoo at a visiting carnival had evidently stoked the naughty boys’ imaginations.)

Yes, Reader, not only was the C. Rule invoked during tournament play, but its petition was granted with no less than a smile from the judge. That is to say nothing, by the by, of an ignoble display of partisanship from another in the press pool, who was later to again intercede himself, only with quite more violence. But I am getting ahead of myself – For now, it should suffice to say that Macintosh’s nerves were sufficiently rattled that the young Scot was barely able to stave off his supercilious foe. When it became clear, during the early stages of the next game, that the abominable denial of his use of the cube would likely cost him the tournament, Macintosh became visibly rised, jaw tight, brow glossy. I think it no exaggeration to describe the arena as altogether aroused by the expectancy of blows to come – Surely the suspense brought out the mustard in this reporter, with no ruth at all!

The ensuing, accidental upset of the table, and the concomitant spillage of checkers to the floor, has been widely reported. I have but one addendum: The professed ‘lip-reader’ employed by our competition has attributed to Parekh, in the moment before the incident in question, the words, “Your nervous perspiring has caused the surface of the board to become moist and unstable, making checker placement difficult.” Such a harmless interpretation would serve his camp indeed well. This reporter, however, has it on good authority that the Indian’s true words were not as described above, but were, in fact, “Haud yer wheest, ye fanny batter, ‘ere I goon tae shag yer sister’s mankae coont.” I will not reveal my source, other than to identify him as within earshot.

Alas, I am obliged to withhold the most delicious of specifics about my time in Cape Town. My solicitor recommends that I save the particulars about what occurred post-match for a later column, or, depending on the outcome of litigation, book. I am happy to report, though, that the swelling has subsided, and I am back on my feet! Roddy Macintosh’s hands were well and fortunately insured, and Lloyd’s of London has generously funded his full convalescence at the Wimbledon YMCA. I hope to soon muster up some supervisory faculty in this regard, and to deliver him home for the Hogmanay festivities the boy so richly deserves. Further news of his progress will be furnished as the editor sees fit.

In short, I think it clear that such a capricious imperative as the C. Rule has no place in the athletic of backgammon, especially beyond spittle-distance from the sodden pubs where it first gained currency. Leave it for the blockheads and muttonbrains, since they are without hope anyway!

A Guide to Horse

There’s a man there on its back in a police uniform as well. I mean do they really need to do that on the back of a horse in that. Not from what I know about the present reality of horses and crime.

Something about it looks like a horse is more intimidating. A horse gets crowd control.

If you think about the sound it makes, it feels rooted in hundreds of years old and incredibly miles away against the street.

Think of all the many legs many horses have.

Horses love it to crush the bodies and the faces of celebrities when you notice it happening.

Pacific Highway South: Best American Strip City (Part 1), by Matt Briggs

Walking the Dog

I live across the street from a swampy vacant lot. Cottonwoods grow on the lot’s margins, and around the lot there are houses, apartment buildings, highways. There are a lot of people who never see one another.

A bird’s nest, empty most of the time except during the spring migration, clings to the cottonwood closest to my subdivision.

I’m not exactly sure what my stretch of suburbs is called. There is a sign on the arterial, but there is a sign at each of the three intersection of my neighborhood at the arterial and each one says something different. Pinewood, I think mine says. There is an Oakwood, and a Mapleleaf, too, I think. Inside, though, the same three house plans have been built on top of small knolls, in dells, in a steady rank up the slope of a long hill. Overgrown trees hold ferns in their the crook of their branches, and rotting birdhouses. Some of the houses sit among clumps of gigantic fir trees. The generation of maples that must have been planted when the construction crews first installed the units have matured, and the city is cutting them down, leaving smooth, whitish flat places where there had been trunks.

There are few sound of people in my neighborhood. Just the sound of the cold wind moving through the cottonwoods, the hollering of some neighborhood girls as they walk down the street; the sound their voices make fill the empty yards. The airplanes moan as they pass overhead. The traffic rumbles and hisses on Pacific Highway South. Even though my neighborhood is populated with people, everyone remains indoors. Christmas lights appear at night, strung during the day maybe, but there nonetheless to cast their light on the empty streets.

I walk my daughter’s beagle through the empty neighborhood. She stops to shiver and poop on someone’s lawn, and I pick it up with plastic grocery bags from Safeway. They are so thin I can feel the poop, still warm and fragrant, and then I reverse the bag around the poop and tie it into a knot. As soon as she is finished with her business, she rakes her paws across the ground, scattering moss, and grass, and then she pulls on the leash. I pull her back and finish tying off the poop. We wander through the dark neighborhood. I wouldn’t come out of the house if I didn’t have the dog to walk. Outside, though, the sun has just set and it is dark but Puget Sound glows purple under the dark blue of Vashon Island. A jet passes close overhead, silent, except for the rush of air. Banks of lights flash. And then it is gone and still around me there is the sound of moving people, and the houses are full of people and I am among them on the empty streets.

Matt Briggs is the author of three story collections: The Remains of River Names, Misplaced Alice, and The Moss Gatherers. His first novel, Shoot the Buffalo, won the American Book Award in 2006. He lives in Seattle, Washington.