Misunderstandings

So, yes, Seal was (and probably still is) after me.

His people were clearly not thrilled about my Seal trivia posts for whatever reason. I don't get it, frankly—it's all public record, and I didn't find any of it particularly bad. But that wasn't the whole of it.

See, I started a Seal-impersonating Twitter account. In retrospect, it was a bad decision. I didn't even say anything sassy. I just wanted to experience, in even the smallest way, what it must be like to be Seal. So I tweeted a couple dozen times, mostly about tour dates that I had made up, and what I thought Seal's diet must be like. (I assume that he eats a lot of salt water and potato bread.)

No harm no foul, right? Wrong. Seal, or Seal's people, came down on me like a soulful ton of bricks. I started to get calls threatening legal action, and I just ran. I went to a bar, where I may or may not have talked a lot about being chased by Seal, and then I woke up in that basement.

Make a long story short, a group of gentlemen to whom Seal apparently owes quite a bit of money thought I was a representative of Seal Inc., and decided to hold me for ransom, or something. I was out of that basement inside of 36 hours, as soon as they realized that there was no chance that Seal was interested in rescuing me.

So there you go! I'm a free man!

PS—I didn't mean half the things I said about Laos. I was under a lot of stress.

Send help, Seal has me.

Hello friends I guess I should say that I'm only assuming it's Seal that has me, but tor one reasonggghgg or another, the shit has really hit the gan God enmity. I'm "typing" by touching bare wires together, and Ii'm getting shocked pretty regularily. And it"s not a super precise method, as you cam.maybe tell. Whoever has captured andimprisoned me uses exclusively Laotian computers,and, as you know, I"m a Thai computer kind of guy. The Pc has spellcheck at least, butwhile spellcheck.is both helping and hurting me, the computer itself is ONLY hurting.me. I've said it before: the Laotians can mot make computers that don'telectrocute users to save their lives. Hey, Laos, try using rubber as an insulator, because whatever this is judtisn't doing the trick. Seriously, I had a Laotian LED belt buckle for a few weeks, and I got ball-zapped so many times I'llbe genuinely amazed if I don't have x-men babies. Amazed and disappointed. But I don't have much time. After my Seal expose a couple weeks ago, I started to get a lit of letters from lawyers. Naturally, I just threw them into my neightnors yard and forgotten about them. It's called the circle of life, and it's what we should all be doing. But Iguess someone feels rifferntlg, because yesterday. As I was. Exiting the pit toilet Kruger behind the super America, someone dropped a bag over my head and hit me with something that felt a lot like a rock. I'd know. And today I woke up in a cellar, covered in shit that can onlybe mine (I'd know), looking at a cinder block.wall with "Lay off, wanker" spray painted on it. Now, ok, Seal isn't the only Brit I've allegedly libelled, butthis feels like too much of a coincidence. It's only by pure luck that the pile of trash they gave me to sleep on had a Laotian computer with an active dialup connectiojesus chrsit. I'm sorry@ but who else could possibly have such awful electronics? It's like they manufactured this accidentally while trying to build some sort of finger incinerator. Let me say it one more time: Thai children can make a computer like you've never seen, but Laotisn child labors couldn't put their own socks on. If they had socks. I hats laos. No, I don't mean that. I'm just stressed. Forceful imprisonment is making me so mean! I'm going to cutthis short and take some tiime to relax. But send help. Tucking.Laos.

Regrets

I dreamed last night that I was Buffy, of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. I had been transported back to the beginning of season 1, and I knew that everything we had fought for, all the sacrifices we had made, had been for nothing, and I was franticly trying to explain to my friends what had happened before those memories disappeared as well. (Apparently that was an obvious side effect.)

I woke up pretty sad. Who knew that reverse time travel was such a tragedy? Avoid it! It will mean that everything you've done meant nothing.

What's more, in all that time as a lady, I never once thought to look down my own shirt. God dammit. Accuse me of objectification, but it was my body.

I tried to get over the whole experience by using conditioner on my mustache in the shower. It was ok, I guess, but I think I'm just going to stick with goose fat for now.

(I'm really getting the hang of this web diary thing now!)

Tha 2 Chxrtuns

I don't remember if I've brought this up before, but this is not the only "The Chesterton Review" in the world or even on the Internet. No, far, far from it. As far from it as one is from zero.

There is, in fact, <a href=http://www.shu.edu/catholic-mission/chesterton-review.cfm>The Chesterton Review</a> of Seton Hall University in New Jersey. That particular TCR, if you can believe it, predates this one by a matter of months (several hundred months, but whatever.)

I'd feel threatened, if not for two things. One is that I have a stable of lawyers at the ready, just begging for food, legal work, and to be let out of their stable. (J/K, it's not a real stable. But they still aren't allowed out.) I can't imagine that a little trademark business would give them any trouble.

Secondly, the other 'Review seems to focus exclusively on the works of one G.K. Chesterton, who, as far as I can tell, was some kind of wizard or mystic. That's cool and everything, and I would never want to offend a wizard, but this TCR looks at so much more than that. It's like we're Walmart, and they're a Chicago Dog cart sitting outside of the Walmart. Sure, we're trying to sell Chicago dogs inside the Walmart too, but the cart isn't exactly a threat to our overall business model.

So there's that. Look them up of you want to. Or don't, actually. I don't want The Other Chesterton Review messing up my search results.

On a somewhat related note, I think now is as good a time as any to give my I'd Rather Be Queefing campaign another little nudge. We want to top the charts with this one, so we have to stay at it.

Actually, if anyone from the other publication has found their way here, maybe you'd be interested in some sort of reciprocity. I could license out the IRBQ phrase to you, and you could, say, put it on some school mugs, or on your website or whatever (think, "I'd rather be queefing ... at Seton Hall University!"), and I could occasionally make an effort to try to get your wizard's face out into the world a little more. Here, actually, you can have this one as a freebie. Put it in your next issue, maybe?!

Breaking the Seal

Is that even a pun? I guess it is, but not like "A Man for All Sealsons." Even though that one was kind of a linguistic stretch, and even though it didn't really relate to any of the ensuing content, I really liked that one. It made me think of Seal standing in the snow, wrapped in a buffalo robe.

I know it's been a little Seal-crazy around here recently, and maybe I've been neglecting important world events (both the Pope and Hugo Chavez recently abdicated, one from life and one from the papacy, but I don't remember which did which), but as I've said, Seal is an interesting guy. I'd call him a latter-day Marquis de Sade, if I didn't think it was more accurate to call the Marquis de Sade an old-timey Seal.

Anyway, I've turned up another Seal gem. (I'm working my way through Seals biographies. None of them are great, but each has some good stories.)

The year is 1990. Seal, booked as "Seal S. Seal," is sitting in a police station. He has been arrested, and he is handcuffed to a desk while he waits for his booking officer to return with some paperwork. Seal was caught, covered in butter, trying to slip through a ceiling vent into a veterinarian's office. Seal claims that he was simply hoping to steal some tranquilizers, but after he regurgitated a large pellet of fur and small bones in the squad car, the arresting officers began to suspect that Seal is not telling the whole truth.

Now, affixed to the desk, Seal is wearing an oversized aloha shirt and cargo shorts, both very buttery. He watches a young girl, perhaps 8 or 9 years old, take a seat at the desk across from his. Seal catches her attention with a hiss, locks eyes, and begins to sing.

That song, made up on the spot, would become 1991's hit single, Crazy.

Seal discussed the incident years later in an interview with NME:
"I don't know. I guess, if I'm being honest, I was trying to hypnotize the kid, or something. I thought I could get her to unlock the handcuffs and set me free. But, see, while I was singing, I guess I broke my own thumbs and pulled my hands right out of the cuffs. I didn't even realize it until the kid came out of her trance to see my broken thumbs wiggling around, because I was dancing, see, and she just started screaming. Yeesh."

When asked about the fur and bones he had vomited in the squad car, Seal had this to say: "First of all, I learned that trick from owls. You gotta get rid of the bones and fur, so that's all that was. Secondly, I was being absolutely honest with the police. I really did want those tranquilizers. I'm just of the opinion that cat tranquilizers are not even worth taking, unless you take them after a cat has already begun to metabolize them. If you have a better idea on how to do that, you write it down and send it to me. No, write it down and read it to me. Doesn't matter, though, because no one reported a missing cat, and no one saw me eat nothing, so I didn't break any laws. How's that idea coming?"

What a guy!

Let's try again: Signed, Sealed, Delivered!

Seal is an interesting guy!

I was searching for him on Yahoo yesterday to make sure I had been spelling his name right—my neighbor had left a note on my window saying that it's actually spelled "Seélle," but my neighbor has been proven time and time again to be a goddamn idiot, so I shouldn't have wasted my time—and I found all sorts of interesting stuff on the Man from Lupus.

Get this: In early 1994, Seal was arrested for punching open the window of an elementary school classroom and, in the middle of Math, sticking his head through the hole and screaming at the 3rd graders inside. He was eventually charged with something like First Degree Upsetting Little Babies, but the slippery ol' pinniped skipped bail and went on the lam.

Even though he hadn't yet been given any sort of prison uniform (having not been convicted of anything), Seal burned his clothing (later explaining that he was sure someone would recognize him if he kept it on), and holed up, naked as a piglet, in a derelict lighthouse.

He spent the next 18 days eating mold and being eaten by vampire bats.

When Seal emerged he was more than 50 pounds lighter, and, according to him, "not even the same fellow who hallooed at those children, so don't even try, yeah?"

Sent to the lighthouse to collect the jewelry that Seal had eaten and passed during his stay there, producer Trevor Horn discovered, scratched into the wall, a single line of lyrics running the entire length of the tower's spiral staircase. Horn copied the lyrics into a notebook, and when he presented the pages to Seal (along with a sandwich bag of filthy rings and bracelets), the artist explained that it was meant to be an epic poem about being consumed by the vampire bats. The title and refrain "kiss from a rose" referred to the flower-like folds of flesh on the bats' noses. (Seal never did say what "the gray" meant, as in "a kiss from a rose on the gray," but in ensuing months he often would mention "a pain in [his] gray.")

It's either a tremendous coincidence or no coincidence at all that "Kiss from a Rose" was later featured on the soundtrack of Batman Forever. Seal, you'll be my batman forever.

What a world!!

Ha ha. Duh!

Well, don't I feel like a stack of bricks and shit.

Obviously the title for that last post should have been "A man for all Sealsons." Dandy, if you always let opportunities like that slip through your fingers, you will never, ever be a published poet.

A man for all seasons

 
A little old-news-news factoid I just learned to (hopefully!!) brighten up your Monday:

No, actually two factoids.

#1:
The artist known as Seal actually wrote the theme song to the 1987 animated series, Duck Tales. According to Seal, most of the lyrics were already written when he was asked to write the song; he claims they came to him in a dream that was "a lot like Blade Runner, but with these little ducks who were wearing clothes." The characters of the Beagle Boys*, in fact, were written into the series based on imagery from Seal's dream. In Seal's own words: "They were, like, three hairless dogmen always chasing me and my duckfriends. They were called Loneliness, Self-Doubt and Death, and they were always trying to get their paws on my crazy! I told the producer about these dogs, and he said, 'Seal, mate, we have to do this.'"

Also, while laying down tracks for the song, Seal reportedly punched the recording engineer in the face when the man asked what a "duck-blur" was.

#2:
We've all heard about Seal's run-ins with animal services and the Humane Society, but this bit had somehow escaped me. Maybe it's new to you as well?

After being videotaped dropping a mouse into a bucket of acid, Seal defended himself to the ASPCA by claiming that it was actually not a mouse, but a toad dressed up in a costume made of mouse skin, and that it had already been dead anyway. When questioned as to how the toad had died (and where the mouse outfit had come from), Seal reportedly became apoplectic, shouting "How do you think it died? How do you think it died? What did you expect me to do?", before pulling an object from his vest pocket and throwing it at the judge. While the thrown item was never found, both the judge and the court artist insist that it was either a live mouse or, taking into consideration the recent testimony, a toad dressed in a mouse costume made of mouse skin.