NYMPHOLEPSY

Frenzy brought on by the desire for the unobtainable.

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THE MANGO PUDDING BLUES INDEX

Number of times deceased American poet Allen Ginsberg is mentioned in this Mango Pudding Blues post of January 14th, 2001: 6

Number of times Ginsberg was spelled Ginsburg: 4

Percentage split of how horrified we were by the mistake and how even more horrified we were at our inconsistency: 35/65

Number of outraged readers who wrote in to complain: 1

Percentage of those readers who were our dear brother: 100

Number of days it took for him to notice: 9

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OH, OTTAWA

As many of you know, Mango Pudding Blues endures the brutal misfortune of being headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, the capital of Canada. Among the other indignities the city regularly serves up, Ottawa is annually pummeled by snowy and cold winters. Ottawa, people here say, is the coldest capital next to Ulan Bator, Mongolia. We have never heard of Ulan Bator except in the comparison to Ottawa for coldness, but anyway, the point here is that Ottawa is cold. Snowy. Nasty. Okay, so the Ottawans, in a rare show of admirable pluck, have traditionally staged a tepid but well-intentioned Winter Festival to make the best of an unpleasant situation. They carve ice and snow into sculptures, they eat these indigenous squashed doughnuts that they call Beaver Tails and, most of all, they ice skate on their beloved canal.

This year, however, the winter has been freakishly mild and so the canal isn’t frozen. In Mango Pudding Blues’ book, that’s a reason for true celebration. Instead of breaking our backs, winter is only going to smack us around a bit. Nice. But are the the townsfolk happy? Hell, no. Demonstrating Ottawans’ mass-hysterical case of Stockholm Syndrome, the local media, which the Mango traditionally avoids, is full of official hand-wringing. Whither the Winter Festival? They ask. Oh brother, we say, rolling our eyes.

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WWEPD?*

See that little flurry of guests tipping the household staff at the end of Gosford Park? When uncertain in these manners, Mango Pudding Blues turns to Emily Post. Does Em support tipping the domestics? You bet! $5 to $10 for the chauffeur, but only if he’s driven you alone or run errands for you. You don’t have to slip him anything for driving you to the disco with your hosts. The cook gets $10 to $15 (these are tough American dollars, incidentally. We’re not certain that anyone in Canada actually has household staff anyway), the gardener another $5 to $10 if he’s brought up fresh flowers for you, and the maid $10 to $15 if she’s been cleaning, unpacking, ironing or providing meals in your room. This is for a long weekend or maybe a week. We are citing here the 16th edition of Etiquette, the deluxe 75th anniversary edition, which is compiled, in fact, by Peggy Post, Em’s great granddaughter-in-law. Peg fails to mention what a butler should get. We’d give him $15 for sure.

Emily is also firm on tipping housekeeping in hotels. $2 per person per night in a large hotel, $1 per person per night in a mid-priced joint. You could probably forego the tipping if you’re staying in a fleabag, although when you think about it, the poor maids in the fleabags probably deserve the dough the most. We used to argue with the Killer about tipping housekeeping, but Emily shut her right up.

*What would Emily Post Do?

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ASK THE MANGO PUDDING BLUES REPRESENTATIVE

Dear Mango Pudding Blues Representative:

Will you eventually lose your special charm and just become a shill for your line of books? Will that sweet little voice of yours eventually give way to commerce as you become the very thing you once were just playfully aping? Will success spoil you? Will you suck?

Concerned in Kamloops


Dear Concerned

Nah. When I sell this shit to AOL Time Warner I will still be the same old Mango Pudding Blues. When I cash in on you guys by selling my subscriber list to casino spammers and take my seat next to Whoopi on Hollywood Squares, I’ll continue to keep it real, yo. When the movie version of Mango Pudding Blues starring that kid from Malcom in the Middle in his first adult role opens to boffo box office and I am arraigned for the coke, the guns and the young girls (’cause when I supernova, I’ma supernova like James Brown, baby), I will keep dishing out the top-drawer Mango Pudding Blues that you have come to love.

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ONE HUNDRED PERCENT BEE POLLEN

Here at Mango Pudding Blues, we are suckers for the panacea. While we are not dumb, we are also not immune to the siren call of the dubious health food practitioner and his claims of eternal youth, uncontainable energy and instant weight loss. We’ve been known to spend hours in the health food store marvelling over pills that make you smarter and powders that make you stronger. We’ve followed Ornish and Atkins and we’ve Eaten To Win and have been, briefly, Fit For Life and have taken Eight Days to Optimal Health. We’ve taken extra amino acids, ren shen fen wang, mega-doses of sublingual b-12, creatine and shark cartilage. We’ve had acupuncture, shiatsu, mee-pee-kung and have considered rolfing and the coffee enema. We have studied at length the controversial recommendations of anti-aging pioneers Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw. We have Dr. Weil bookmarked. For a while several years ago we were boosting our metabolism with equal doses of caffeine, aspirin and ephedrine that would make a trucker’s heart palpitate.

Our latest stab at faddish health quackery was to beef up (heh heh) our protein intake with twice-daily protein powder shakes, believing this would make us smarter, stronger, and increase our sexual prowess and our general animal presence. We imagined we would become as sleek and sinewy, as cool and as cunning and as deadly, as panthers. Instead we ballooned up like Marlon Brando. We are as doughy and jowly as Mariah Carey. We are puffy.

We look like shit.

And so, in spite of our potential new years resolution number 12 (“brave,” our brother noted recently, “of you to post your resolutions so that we can all come back and check how you’re doing.” Har har. But the astute reader will recall that the new years resolution post was about possible resolutions that we were merely considering. We have committed to nothing.), we dumped the barrel of protein powder down the drain and have now taken up eating mainly sawdust in the desperate pursuit of our former figure. Yes, readers, we are trying to reduce.

And so, with reduction on our minds, we took notice the other day of an article in, like, Woman’s World Weekly at the checkout stand in the grocer’s. This was some cheesy magazine with very poor quality paper but the editorial content of your average Woman’s Day or Family Circle. You know; how to cook a pot roast and the wonder of polyester/spandex blend slacks and Joan Lunden on the cover and so on. Anyway, Woman’s World Weekly claims that it is coffee that is making us fat. So now we are considering dropping the joe in favour of green tea, which is what Women’s World Weekly says will make us skinny again.

Our interest in these things is shared by our brother, who has recently been poking around in the fridges of the health food shop to determine which brand of acidophilous contains the greatest number of billions of active cells that will make him more robust and asking after the liver-cleansing properties of Milk Thistle. We both inherited this trait from our father, who has been dabbling in health potions long before they became a multi-million-dollar industry. Pop’s favorite panacea is his bee pollen. He thinks bees are magically evolved creatures who have figured out all this shit long ago. And like a drug pusher, he’s always eager to turn you on to whatever he’s taking.

One Christmas Eve I was back at home for the festivities and he told me, drunkenly, that he was now getting his bee pollen in bulk from the local honey-hive dudes just outside of town.

“No kidding!” I said, also drunkenly. We had been tucking liberally, Christmasally, into the port and had by this time graduated to the brandy.

“Oh, ja,” he said. Imagine the thick German accent here. “You vanna try some?”

So we stagger on over to the bureau in his bedroom and he digs out this baggie. The baggie is full of little tiny pellets that are dusty and earthy and various shades of yellow. He tells me that the bees roll the pellets themselves with their little bee legs. He digs in with a spoon and gives me a bit. Maybe half a teaspoon. You chew it. It tastes like dust sweetened with honey. Not bad.

“Tomorrow you feel like a million bucks!” my drunken dad promises me. I’m not so sure. I have been drinking a lot.

“Better gimme a little more,” I say.

He grunts, shrugs, nods. Digs in again. Then he knots the baggie and hands it to me. “Ja. I giff you some.”

“Oh, man, no! Pop! I can’t take your last bee pollen,” I protest. The old man just laughs and says no, he buys it by the kilo, and do I wanna see that? And so we pause for a bit more brandy, and then he’s gleefully leading me through the golden kitchen where my mother and sister are smoking cigarettes and talking in front of the window that’s still thoroughly steamed over from my mother’s Christmas Eve cooking, and we’re going downstairs to the deep freeze, where he’s got a bag of bee pollen as big as my head. We eat a little more, right then and there, to celebrate his ingenuity. It tastes exactly the same frozen. I can’t remember how much he said he was paying, but it was a definate savings over store-bought bee pollen pills, and this was one-hundred-percent-pure bee-rolled bee pollen.

“I sprinkle it on my cereal!”

I try a little more. “No!” I yell. We are yelling. We are drunk.

“Ja! Und I haf a little ven I’m not feelink so good!”

“Oh!” I say, I try a little more, figuring I mightn’t be feelink so good the next day. He scoops a chronic helping into yet another baggie and we take it upstairs with us to the living room, where we roll up our sleeves and get back into the brandy.

“Tell me more about the bees!” I beg, gooned.

“Ja! Zey are amazink!” And I take a little more bee pollen as he tells me, just as insurance against possible Christmas Day hangover. I am pouring from the baggie shakily into my cupped palm, trying for roughly one teaspoon per slug of brandy, figuring that a) if a little is good, more is better, and b) since I have the shield of bee pollen, I can certainly drink more than I normally would. Right?

And the next day I don’t even remember anything at all past say 4:00 pm of the day before, so I have no idea what this sweet, stinging yellow paste is that I am puking up into the toilet, this paste of bile and bee pollen, and I contemplate rushing myself to the hospital, figuring my liver has finally burst.

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Mango Pudding Blues is highly recommending this Modern Life thing, which is not exactly a comic and not exactly a cartoon but goddam if it doesn’t vibrate at the frequency that we demand of great art. It’s that good. We’re late on this particular bus, but we’re glad we finally caught it.

We’re also bullish on Strain 17, the new bite-sized candy-bar of a book by Joshua Allen. Not to drop any names, not to put on any airs, not to be a total starfucker or anything, but our copy arrived the other day directly from the author himself, and although we are eager to curry his favour, we are telling the truth when we say it’s great. We think Joshua Allen is the new Richard Brautigan. Really.

And while we’re going on an on and on, we might mention that we’re having a sudden and completely unexpected little African music renaissance, diggin’ on two records we just bought by Fela and Kanda Bongo Man. We might also mention that we’re just crazy about red-hot Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdés, whose 2001 solo recital Live in New York we also just bought. And okay, whew! That’s enough!

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