The Babbling Writer's Brook

A Thief, Sting, a Lady, McGraw and Botti . . . have ear will travel

2010-08-18T21:46:00.000-04:00

Hi guys, Tink here, and you're totally . . . No where man? Just getting musical after the John Lennon Lithographs. Since I'm totally a literary character the term applies to me much more absolutely.

This summer has been a musical happening for the SOG (sick old guy) and me. I've been totally trying to give him some bounce to his step. Wished they sold pogo stick insoles at Dr. Scholls. Which starts you thinking with all that work and experimentation on shoes and human's feet, what must Dr. Scholl's house smell like. Especially if he brings his work home. Maybe his wife would rather he brought home the bacon, smells more appetizing.
When he shakes your hand, does he leave a foot odor behind? Can you get athlete's hand, or hoof in mouth disease, as is virulently present on this blog?
Instead of using a Swifter Mop on the floors, does he use a wet odor eater insert on a shoe horn? Do the meals stink like the inside of a humid human shoes? Filet of Sole anyone? Baked I'll Ask Her why the food is so tough, but I don't want to be a heel. That be the sole of ingratitude for a free meal. Something smells fishy to me and we need to stay focused on feet.
Is the house air freshener an anti-fungal spray? Is it heaven for their canine where he can tear anything and still think it is an old shoe? No Fido, stop chewing the piano, it's not that old or worn out. In fact, its foot pedals are bare, not a insole in sight.
The vaudeville routine is not over yet. Too bad huh?
For exercise, does Dr. Scholl's pound the shoe leather? Was his favorite Jockey Willie Shoemaker? His favorite newspaper Cartoon - Shue? When there are bats in his belfry does he tell them to shoo? And here is a fitting shoe ending to this horrible haberdashery hoedown: when the ghost of his friend Foo haunts his house, resting on his couch, - this one is a really bad - when the Foo sits is he aware of it? Something are totally better left unsaid.

You don't have to sing my praises, because all summer, SOG - ole Mad Mutt - and I have been visiting musical happenings. Mutt is musically challenged for any tune written after 1955, except for the Beatles, the Stones, Hendrix, and the Doors. Oh and maybe Janis Joplin. They all have someone who is gratefully dead, but SOG isn't playing with Gerry Garcia and that moribund group yet. Me, I'm musically ignorant of Brenda Lee, Lesley Gore, Bobby Vinton, and to me no one should be named after a large yellow taxi, Chubby Checker.

We started out with Sting and the Philharmonic at the Garden State Arts Center. The summer had barely begun, and flowers were blooming, but still old Mutt calls one of my favorites Stink. He says he doesn't like the register of his voice, "Male altos upset him. They remind him of the male choirs from Italy." He means twenty year old castratos that don't yet shave and sing in registers higher than the Empire State building.

While Sting aka Stink is not that bassally challenged, Mutt offered to buy him a pair of woofers, to place in his joc so he could masquerade as something other than a capon. The SOG complained during his performance at the Arts Center that his raspy cat mating calls made him scratch around his male parts ("just taking inventory"). Not an exciting itch, but the kind of itch you get after sitting on foreign (not well cleaned) toilets. "That's the type of crab I don't enjoy steams, or boiled." He absolutely thinks that is funny. Not!

Next he surprised me with a tailgate party and concert at the Arts Center. It was called Thunderfest. Monmouth county's Country Music Station W-eat-my-grits sponsored it. We didn't know there were totally so many hillbillies in Monmouth County. When we tried to buy tickets at the window that afternoon, we were told it was absolutely sold out. However, we lucked out, and bought three tickets wholesale from a person in a Land Rover. No they weren't scalped, in fact they were sold for under the face price. Sometimes, when the Foo sits you are aware of it. So we tailgated and sat on the lawn.

Mutt wanted to know "whats with all the girls wearing denim/leather mini skirts, cowboy hats, Stetsons no less, draw string shirts or bustiers, and boots to the knee in the soft wet muddy grass of the lawn?" It looked like a teenage dominatrix convention without the riding crops or whips. A few may have been hiding handcuffs.

Yelling "Yahoo," and "You tell'em Tim" during the performances? They even yelled "you tell'em Tim" during Lady Antebellum and Love and Theft when Tim McGraw wasn't in the county, much less on stage. The beer stands sold liter sized cans and everyone was chugging and lugging. I think the Coors Light people made out real good. You betcha. The stand attendants kept saying, "Y'all come back now ya hear."

Oh wowzers, I've been infected with countritis encephalitis - I'm speaking in tongues, country tongue. It's a disease associated with a Fecal Encephalopathy, known as shit for brains. There is a very close association between the two, and one diagnosis almost always accompanies the other. It causes a drawl in your y'all and grows a stalk of alfalfa between y'all's front teeth. It is often associated with a dumb shit-eating smile. :)

Oh my god. The antidote is reading anything. Even the label of the beer can held by the redneck that bit you. Pardon me while I read a Chekhov short story. . . .

201 Chekhov short stories
A Lady with the Dog

I'm like absolutely back. Let's, like totally, hope I don't have a spontaneous relapses and become incommunicado due loss of vocabulary, while holding onto the rifle in the rack by the rear window of my Ford pick'em up truck.

Is there an antibiotic for this disease? Like Urbanicillen? Cosmopolitanomycin? Culturisporin? Is there a Northern-pharmacist in the house?

Back to music and concerts. I'll make a concerted effort to stay musical.
Love and Theft had a great drummer and their songs rocked, especially for a country group. Lady Antebellum has won an Grammy and they were worth the price of admission. By the time Tim McGraw got on stage, everyone was tired. The girls with their boots hung off the tattooed arms of the guys with cargo shorts at half-mast exposing the top half of their boxers and sometimes the crack where their brains resided. Of course, their brains are cracked, no one would look or act that way if they had a quarter wit about them. These urban guido cowboys had already hung their wife beater undershirts on their belts and stood bare-chested in the shadows of the lawn, like some gorilla in the mist. All the while wearing cowboy hats, because they were probably bald. The hat ain't no brain protector, they'd have to sit on the hat for that function.

I'm sorry I insulted gorillas. They aren't dumb enough to drink till you-wobble-when-you-walk, and then try to drive home from a parking lot filled with other silver backs in a similar condition.

We left before bumper cars started. Tim McGraw looked and sounded like he envied our early departure. He sung half the lyrics to his songs and then pointed the mike at the audience and let them sing the rest. He barely broke a sweat. I guess he was saving himself for the after party, with some of the left over dominatrix girls and their stetsons. He was animated in a family like country way. Animated was his aunt nym, totally like no relation.

Next I dragged the SOG to see Chris Botti at the renovated Count Basie theater in Red Bank New Jersey. That is another complete misnomer. There isn't a single fiduciary institution in the town that even hints of being in the red or structural is red. Looking at the signs "you are now entering Red Bank." You think you have mis-read the name. Even the Raritan River which runs by the town has no red banks. So where did the name come from anyway.

Oh yeah, Chris Botti and his concert. He got his start with Oprah. Apparently he dropped out of Indiana University to play with Frank Sinatra's forty-fifth comeback revival band. Mutt liked him immediately. Then he started to play music with his talented group. Each instrument, bass guitar, bass, lead guitar, keyboard, piano, drums, and Botti on the trumpet played their hearts out. Their style is Coltrane/Davis jazz. If only they had practiced or at least communicated with each other what piece they were playing. It might have worked out better. Everyone of those guys can play, but just not together with anyone else. Occasionally and randomly they actually played in short bursts that sounded good. Then they realized they had reached a harmonious cord, and did their best to forget how that happened. The rest of the time, loud, atonal, inharmonic and competitive would best describe the conglomerated noise put forth as music.

Guest appearances by a talented violist, and a singer with the range of air force troop transporter, added talent and some order to the music. The singer was only slightly smaller than the troop transporter.

At the end Botti admitted that he hired his drummer to receive compliments from Stink who is his good friend. That's when the SOG wanted to go home. His ears had received enough abuse and so we left.

Mutt says the coming of fall is music to his ears. Between the invasions of the islanders from the north and the music from the south, and Stink from over seas he's ready to lie on the chaise in the back yard near the pool and listen to Diane Washington, or Billie Holiday, while drinking a Murphy's Stout. No wife-beater, no stetson, no cargo pants, and I ain't a wearin' no cowboy boots, (Sorry short relapse of countritis). He wants a baggy swim suit and sleepy eyes till the air clears, and the foreigners go home for the fall.

This is Tink, saying like totally so long for now.
Don't let the sun catch you cryin'.

Yoko O No "In My Life"

2010-08-06T15:36:00.000-04:00

Sunday Tink and I visited Long Branch. It is a short drive up from Spring Lake. The sky was clear, after morning showers, and the beach was white. The people were abundant.

The afternoon begged for us to walk the boards. The temperature was hot enough to leave no ponds behind on the shore or puddles on the roads. Walking, you really appreciate the intermittent breeze, as a caress ten degrees cooler than stolid air.
Tink encouraged the SOG (Sick Old Guy) within me to take a leave of absence for an hour, and we walked. Long Branch's boardwalk is unique, as it goes up and down over the undulating roadway of Ocean Avenue.

The mix of people made for a gallery of anthropological proportions from the Orthodox Jewish family with five kids - one pushed in a stroller, pregnant-mother, father, and grandparents all in shydels and yarmulkes to the Russian speaking couple, of whom the lady's large silver East Orthodox crucifix tilted upwards from her protruding belly with a pierced popped navel.
We watched a mother and two young daughters sneaking under the railing onto the beach while a police car sit not thirty feet away. The police man stared at his in-vehicle computer screen as if he were on the Internet looking at porn while the women sans beach badge stole their space on the beach. Life is good, if not great.

When we finished the walk, I had both a secret agenda and a plan. My plan drew us to 78 Ocean Avenue – the former? site of Atlantic Books – for an exhibit of John Lennon’s lithographs. Although Lennon’s zenith as a performer pre-dates Tink’s musical awareness, she had interest in the show. I remember rock n roll prior to the Beatles, but that is another story that we will get to later. I serve as Tink's pre-historic knowledge reservoir. Yes, I am her personal dinosaur.

The showing presented 30 to 40 of Lennon’s sketches most of which involved pictures of his family or himself or both. (I didn't remember he went to art school in London.) Family means Yoko and Sean. Julian Lennon was disowned by this collection, as might be expected since Yoko is involved with the production. The lithographs were for sale as well, although some of the selection was already sold out.

We wandered the exhibit with each litho having a caption. You did not realize the propaganda behind the captions until you used both your brains and your eyes to appreciate his work. Lennon is a good sketch artist. His best works do not involve subjects that are related to him or his family. Yet a majority of the showing was just that. Was this because his works usually involved himself - artist's ego? Or was the selection process biased towards these drawings that might be more saleable?

I realize that an artist, song-writer, author, and sculpture must have an ego the size of the earthly atmosphere to succeed. So I ask again, did he mainly draw self-portraits or did Yoko select his auto-biographical works disproportionately?
Even those lithographs that were of animals and other things non-Lennon were put into the Lennon-esque perspective by their captioning. One was meant to show Sean this philosophy or attitude, and this drawing was meant to teach Sean that. Everything Lennon and nothing separate as pure art. Yoko please remember that the essence of Lennon's Philosophy is simple, All You Need is Love. Not singularly self-love, but love of everyone.
You don't need captions to control the viewer's mind. What does it says about the artist and his work if it has to be explained? If the art requires an explanation, then it is not communicating.
How much of a control freak does that make the captioner, Yoko?

Who the hell am I to make these insights? I am the audience, the one being manipulated. I mean the one being communicated with.

Most of the "drawings" that weren't involving John directly were etching of lyrics he wrote. How amazing that he composed the lyrics for his songs using the lithographic-etching process. No note pad, and no corrections, and no doubt more money earned by the reproduction. I know, this is Dr. R. Cynic poisoner of thoughts talking. Even more amazing were the lack of strike throughs and cross outs in that material. Don't you want to own a lithograph of lyrics as written by John and reproduced by ?? I can write them out on parchment and sell them to you too. All You Need is . . . Guile.

As to the propaganda, several of the later drawings show John with Sean walking through Central Park, and associated with them is a third person. The caption says, that is the ghost of a younger John. They intimate that Lennon had a premonition that he was going to die soon after drawing these sketches. If John knew that wouldn't the ghost be an ethereal presentation of his older self, the man walking with the child, not the teenager gesticulating at the "old man."

John more than likely drew the young-self ghost, because as all parents do, he saw his youth in the presentation of his son, Sean. He missed the days of his youth. He relived his days through his son, when life was simpler and maybe happier for him. I can't believe he knew he was going to be shot. Here I choose to ignore the untimely death of his mother when he was age nine. Or maybe he thought he was doomed for the same ending? That isn't explained because Yoko probably does it want it that way. Another woman competing for John's love, impossible for her to allow. She wants us to remember the clairvoyant, poet, who meditated and wrote song. The only person alive who really knows the depth of John's talent and ego is the Walrus, Paul McCartney. He won't talk because it will take away from him, so . . .

As we walked the exhibit, Tink viewed the lithograph from when John and Yoko spent a week in bed for world peace. It started her talking about children and babies, which she knew would only exacerbate our debate as her biological clock is ticking. I placed an arm around her shoulder and cautioned her that an old man like me would be in my seventies when the kids hit college age. I warned her a week in bed might leave her widowed before she was married. While none of this deters her, she was interrupted by a Margaret Dumont like matron, "You should be ashamed of yourself. She no more than a child. You should stay to your own age." She paused and smiled. "Some one like me." She placed a hand on her hip and threw it up and down. Because of her bearing she bumped two men who were holding hands as they studied one of John's lithograph.

Tink stared daggers. "I'm 49 years old (a bald-faced lie, she added more than 15 years), you just don't know how to take care of yourself, and probably don't know how to take care of a man either."

I leaned down and kissed the Pixie's cheek. It felt warm and looked pink.

The lady huffed once, but could think of no retort.

But Tink wasn't finished yet. "Doc, let go home and try to make a baby now." She slid her hand into the vacant back pocket of my Bermuda shorts, and directed me out the door.

Matron Dumont took out her cell phone no doubt dialing Jerry Falwell or Rush Limbaugh for advice. She couldn't call the police because they were too busy watching the computer screen on their cruiser. Even the Moral Majority enjoys John Lennon's art.

It was 4:30 and the sky remained clear. I thought about the Haskell Invitational at Monmouth but I liked Lookin' at Lucky and at 4 to 5, I'd do better blind investing in the stock market using the Wall Street Journal and a pin. He won easily as I watched it on television later that evening.
My secret agenda was next. I strolled Tink down Ocean Blvd to Avenue. No, not Ocean Avenue, but the restaurant Avenue, which is top rated by New Jersey Magazine. We had never tried it before although Pam had dined their with Alex and said it was as good as any restaurant in New York City.

Here is the menu for Dinner.

Tink loved the meal and then we went home. We turned on Night at the Opera and laughed at Margaret Dumont while lying together in our pj's on the couch.

This is the Mad Mutt substituting for Dr. M.T. Skull. Saying, it Shore was a great day.

Tink is back and she mad. Never piss off a Pixie.

2010-08-01T18:22:00.000-04:00

Oh Wowzer. I thought I would never get to write on this blog again. Doctors have a lot on their minds, and sometimes, well that mind is absolutely a sieve.

Can't remember the pass word. How bad an excuse is that? Dr. Als Zymer remember to take a Tony Robbins or Tony Roberts course or something like that. Then graduate with a Tony Award, in some broad way, it might help your memory.

Oh but absolutely I'm not talking about my dear doc, the Mad Mutt, he remembered the code and gave it to that other guy, doc half-wit. The one who runs this blog, and writes our stories, and thinks he's important.

Mutt and I call him, Doctor M. T. Skull. Of course not to his face or you'd never hear from us again. He has a temper worse than Zambone's. The name he uses on the book cover, that's just a pseudonym. He is Dr. M. T. Skull. Or maybe he is Doctor R. Cynic (pronounce Syn-nick), poisoner of words and writing.

You know the guy I'm talking about with the totally receding hairline. Nothing grows inside or out of that noggin. It's like a New Jersey landfill. We need to call the EPA and warn them of his toxic thoughts.

You thought that odor was just springtime in New Jersey and it would stop with Summer? Absolutely totally negativo, he generates it on a regular basis as he creates our new stories. His brain is like a diesel engine from a 1945 Mac Truck running in your garage. When he is dormant then the odor dissipates, like the ashes from a volcano.

For the public welfare, Mutt and I have to help him with stories and writing, and proof-reading or we wouldn't exist, and you wouldn't enjoy, and he wouldn't ever be dormant. That odor would be constant. We are the expediters, writing's equivalent of the Clean Air Association.

Imagine if there were a strong wind from Central New Jersey towards Manhattan, Manhattanites would flee to Massachusetts seeking health care and treatment. Noxious fumes that is a real problem, unlike the Real Housewives of New Jersey, who fume noxiously.

Of course, with Obama-care we may wind up having the Massachusetts health plan for the whole nation. Worse for us in NJ since Christy is crossing party lines to screw up New Jersey's hospital system and everything else.

Anyway, we're all back, Mutt, Pam, Jayson, Darvesh, Grabowski, Frank, even Zambone is still alive, and sort of living, captive under the dome of M.T. Skull, the half-wit savant of New Jersey.

He's started working on our second adventure, which involves the death of my Ob-Gyn. As Mutt would say, Oh Boy- Got You Naked. It's so embarrassing when my Doc says something like that above a whisper.

MT wants to name the victim Dr. Phil Anders, so I guess you know why he is dead. No I didn't give the plot away, only a pixelated joke from the Pixie. The murder mystery is a case of hit and run, with the police missing the point, and writing it off as an accident.

Dr. Madison Muttnick to the rescue. He just can't leave it alone. A colleague's death, my doctor, you know he wants the right answer, even if it will kill him or someone else. Although Grabo threatens Mutt, it is a closed case, and the police can't stop him from investigating. He has time since his practice is slow.

We expected to know the ending of this story sometime in 2011, so absolutely don't ask questions now. We don't even know who did it yet, or the real name of my doctor other than Dr. OB-GYN. M.T. Skull will figure these things out later (with help from superior minds).

Later this week, Mutt and I will take the night off and have dinner at Matisse in Lake Como (nee Belmar). Yeah like I could get my Mad Mutt to fly to Italy and be like George Clooney. He's more like Perry Como, than Lake Como & Joe Don Looney more than George Clooney.

It would take Dr. M.T. Skull to send us there on a murder mystery, and he isn't known for spending a lot of money on us. He bitches and moans when he needs new ink cartridges for the printer.

Maybe we can get him to write us a European vacation and find a dead body on the French Rivera. I can totally dream can't I?

Back to the restaurant Matisse so Wowzers, look at the menu, click below.
I can't figure out what to have, but everything looks delicious

Help me out, select a dish that looks really good.

Throwing Pixie dust your way,
Rosemary Angelucci aka Tink, Mutt's Pixie.

Sorry about being away

2010-07-23T12:29:00.000-04:00

It has been along time since my last post. I am sorry, but I was recovering from a medical problem. And then I forgot my password for this darn blog. But Dr. Muttnick remember it, and so here we are.

In the interim, I have completed the murder mystery novel 4 Deaths, 2 Heart Attacks and a Stroke ... Then the Fatal Blow. My thanks goes out to the small critiquing group for making the story better than I could have written alone. They are christened Team Mutt.

The manuscript is looking for representation as we speak or as you read.

The main character is Dr. Madison Muttnick, an orthopedic surgeon who sees the evil in his community and wants to remove it. He believes the well spring of that evil is the VP of Medical Affairs at his hospital, Dr. Judas Ninestine. He plans to kill him and accept the consequences, in what he believes is a noble gesture.
Before he can act, another persons completes the task. However, with a taped phone threat from Mutt and the doc's blood on the murder victim, the prime suspect becomes the Mad Mutt. He must defend himself against the murder charge, so he investigates the real NJ boys, the Zambone Construction Co., and the administration of his hospital, which is heavily involved in No-Bell Billing. The No-bell enterprise is woven through out his hospital supplying security guards, as well as ancillary support for coding, billing and record keeping. He concludes the cause of his dying practice is No-Bell's involvement in patient referrals as they present to the Emergency Room of his hospital.
His old enemy detective Jahn Grabowski is in charge of the murder investigation. And the FBI is investigating the construction business which dovetails into an investigation of Mutt and his Atlantic City visits. The money he wins, disappears, never banked and never declared.
During this situation, his estranged daughter Pam appears on his doorstep with a grandson he never knew about. Divorced from a man Mutt never met, she finds him living with Rosemary Angelucci, Tink, who is barely older than his daughter, Pam. The four of them live in Mutt's Spring Lake shore home under an uneasy truce.
The CEO of the hospital dies of cardiac arrest while talking in a closed room with Dr. Muttnick. Grabowski suspects and hopes he has the doctor for two murders. He arrests him and Dr. Muttnick is arraigned with Pam as his lawyer. For bail he puts up the shore home as collateral.

If you are interested in how it ends, then follow this blog for events when and if this story is published.
In the mean time, I am returning to the computer as the second in the Dr. Madison Muttnick series is rattling through my brain pan and echoing into an outline that will see him investigate the murder of one of his friends who is a physician on staff.

Thanks for visiting my blog.
This piece wasn't written by Tink or Mutt, but the originator, progenitor of Madison Muttnick MD.
They will be back later to write for you soon.

Whoodle or Poodle she’s the same bitch to me.

2009-10-12T16:50:00.009-04:00

The sad story of the adopted poodle who wasn’t.

Bubs aka Bubbles is adopted. We’ve never told her but she is. When she was a pup, less than 2 years-old, I would lay awake at night dreading the day I’d have her to tell her that we picked her out at the shelter; that we had never met her parents; and that although we could see and had been told she was a poodle, we could not document any of that. She would have to take it on faith.

When she played at the dog park with the other dogs, she never demonstrated any self-effacement, but I knew inside, not knowing … made her sad. If we had bought her directly from the breeder things would have been different, but we loved her as much as if she were given directly to us.

It wasn’t the shelter for abused women dogs; it was a shelter for the unwanted, homeless and abandoned. The family who bought her from the breeder was childless, and then the wife who was 43 years old became pregnant. At least they didn’t blame Bubs for the pregnancy. They worried about a dog with the child, and gave up the pup. Life is full of choices, that’s why it’s spelled L – IF - E.

The whole story started when I promised Pam if she got an A in math, her hardest subject, that she could have a dog. She’d have to walk and take care of it. I thought she’d learn responsibility. Similar to thinking that chess would teach her to be logical. Not every idea I have works out perfectly. This one, well …

Pam received an A plus in geometry, - there’s a reason she was accepted to Harvard undergrad and Yale Law school; it’s called brains.

We drove the station wagon to the shelter. Pam loved Bubbles on first sight. I have to admit that Bubbles’ dark siren eyes sang to my soul. She was a seductress of a major magnitude. The tilted head with the soft stare could melt Simon Legree’s heart, not that I put myself in his class, but during those days, working the hours that I did, well … after 40 hours awake: emergency surgery sandwiched between working two sets of 5 hours in the office, (25 to 30 patients, not all pleasant, but all needing help) being a pleasant Ole Mad Mutt all the time was difficult.

Sorry, I got sidetracked back to Bubs riding home.

So wee-wee pad and cage in the back of the station wagon and Bubs already showing her lack of demeanor, barking and spinning in excitement, we drove home.

In the car, she would bark first at me, and then in her excitement she’d yell at the dog. Yes, I am talking about Pam who made Bubs look calm. Who says teenagers always have to play it cool? It gave me a giggle that I had to hide, so as not to incur the wrath of my daughter. At one point, between Pam’s barks and Bubs’ answers, it seemed they were singing a chorus together, in harmony.

The dog fed off Pam and by the time we got home, they were fully bonded.

The ex’s first words were, “Did you have to pick a dirty dog. You and Pam wash her clean before she steps in my house.”

So Pam and I took Bubs out on the patio, by the pool and hosed her down and washed her up. Most dogs would probably be upset or mad at the treatment, but she was a trooper. She bit the water from the hose and rocked up and down like a carrousel horse. (She does that move even today when she is really excited.)

She barked, but not at us. She encouraged her pampering, nuzzling Pam’s hand as she soaped the dog up. Her head-thrown-back barks seemed like the whinnies from a sire about to be bred to his favorite mare.

When we were finished, she looked no whiter. She was an off-white standard poodle. That’s what we thought. We already loved our mutant. She looked champagne colored or slightly tan. The curls were poodle although the length of the fur seemed a bit long. Maybe the curls were just a little straighter than I expected, but the length may have made them hang out.

We accepted Bubs for who she was. A mutant poodle even though the shelter had provided us with papers from the owner stating she was a pure bred. If we ever wanted to breed her to an AKC registered poodle, the off spring would be AKC registered purebred poodle. At least that is what the paper documented.

8 months after Bubbles arrived, Pam and my ex left for New York and my ex’s boyfriend in Westchester. My ex was only too happy to leave Bubs with her two daily walks with associated poop patrol, and grooming, and need for attention.

“We each get a child. You and my daughter certainly don’t think I would be yoked to that tan fuzz ball. Bubbles is your child, as Pammie is mine. We split the children down the middle. Pammie can beg all she wants, you have Bubbles.”

Bubbles became Bubs because no man wants to be walking his large off white poodle and calling, “Here Bubbles” while standing outside of a tavern at the Jersey shore. The reaction could keep Mike Tyson in shape and training.

The dog liked her nickname and so did I. About two years after we brought her home, I received a note from the shelter.

Ophelia Shakespeare Desdemona iii, the dog you adopted two years ago, has a problem. Please contact us.

Yes, Bubs real name as provided by her breeder was actually, Ophelia Shakespeare Desdemona iii. No wonder she liked Bubs better.

A letter of this tone, received by a physician, creates the type of fear that makes you check your healthcare coverage. Bubs was unemployed and therefore had none. She couldn’t apply for Blue Bone and Blue Muzzle, and she was ineligible for Medicaid, unless she could prove she was a Chihuahua from Mexico with a green card or work visa. People have told me that some individuals on Medicaid have neither of those documents. Can you believe that?

Even now, our President O’Bummer ignores her demographics for healthcare coverage. Get out the dog vote next election.

I visited the shelter and they gave me a letter, which had been initially sent to the family that bought Bubs from the breeder. It stated that she was not a purebred Poodle. Although her mother had been a poodle, she, the mother, had escaped for a fling with the Wheaton Terrier sire on the next farm.

Had they been planning this assignation, or was it totally happenstance? We will never know, but Bubs was one of the products of the love connection. She was one of the original Whoodles. The cross breeding of a Poodle with a Wheaton Terrier.

They are magnificent dogs and Bubs is a typical product. She is off white in color with long curled fur and a mix in stature between the two breeds. She is usually docile like a poodle, but when whipped up, like a meringue, she behaves with the energy of a terrier.

I wasn’t planning on breeding Bubs so the revelation was moot. However, like a good golf swing, the story would not be complete without the follow through. In the second paragraph of the letter, the breeder asked to have the names of all off spring and their owners so that the AKC could correct the breeding lines and keep the poodle breed pure.

They would perform this task for me, if I paid them $400. If I wished to perform this communications process myself, they would forward the papers for $400. If I wished to continue breeding in the future, I would need the full sire line papers and that would cost me $400. If I did not contact them, they would forward the problem to the AKC, and make sure that any off spring of Ophelia Shakespeare Desdemona iii, would be ineligible in either classification, Poodle or Whoodle.

My natural inclination was to send them a letter to stuff their whole kit and caboodle with a noodle up one of their poodles. Tink prevailed on me to ignore the letter, since we have the best dog, and they have the problem of fraud.

Seemed like a good plan, but now I worry about how I am going to tell Bubs. We know who her sire and dam were, but they weren’t of the same breed. She's a mixed breed. How will this affect her self-esteem? She usually trots proudly on the sand or boardwalk. I don’t want her to lose her swagger.

The reason why this comes up urgently today is that the breeder, through the shelter, has located me. They sent me a bill for the paper work they have enclosed. $400. So I guess, Tink’s plan failed.

When I called the shelter, they said the breeder asked for my name. The reason they gave was a hereditary hip problem that the dog might have and needed evaluation. The shelter only wanted the dog to be taken care of well.

I may only be a human orthopedic surgeon, but I know that a dog, who is 13 years old in dog years, and therefore, approximately 91 years in human counting, would probably have demonstrated a congenital hip defect by now. She has been on glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate since she was 5. The dog still chases squirrels, and Mrs. Leary’s cat, not to mention, the creature in the bramble, who at times gets Bubs a little whipped up.

So I am not too worried about her congenital hip problem.

I am worried about others getting sucked in by this plan to make a breeder’s deception or fraud profitable for them. I think the AKC needs to be informed of this problem. I just didn’t know how to go about it.

Over dinner last week Pam listened as Tink laughed about Bubs needing a total hip and Ole Doc Snickers – aka the Mad Mutt - putting one in her hip.

Pam offered her services because she loved her dog. On her office stationary she wrote the breeder a letter. Essentially in legalese, it states you broke it, you fix it at your expense, or we will seek reimbursement for lost income from failure to have breeding stock as advertised.

She mentioned 8 breeding seasons that would have been useable if the dog were truly a Poodle. At an average of 4 pups per litter and $1500 per dog, she estimated the damages as $48,000.

Of course, if we had actually bred the dog there would have been costs to us, but the other side of the equation was that most litters are larger than 4 pups.

Lawyers, can’t live with them and can’t live without them.

We haven’t received a letter back from the breeders as yet, but I do have the post card from the return-receipt-requested certified-letter sent by Pam.

Isn’t life fun? Just when you thought the sea was calm, some one of exceptionally low intelligence runs your bow in a speedboat. Trim the mainsail and give full chase, overheating your cannon’s muzzle from the cannonade.

Sink the Bastards and make them scuba diving fodder.

As to Bubs, she handled all this well. I haven’t noticed her off her feed, and she still protects the house at night running from window to window barking at the damn keening from that bramble.

Sorry, I promised that we would disclose the creature of the wild rose bramble this week, but I have to defer that to the future because of this shocking news.

I am the Mad Mutt, proud owner of a Whoodle, who can’t even whistle Yankee Doodle. Goodnight Jimmy Cagney, and all ships at sea.

Sunday at the wedding. Hey it’s me Tink. Awesome!

2009-10-03T21:33:00.000-04:00

Caveat: some names have been changed to protect the guilty, such as Nozzle and Sprae, but they are close enough to get the picture.

Hey! Typing here is just awesome. I’m totally into it, you know.

This is Rosemary or as most of you know me, Tink. I managed to get to the keyboard while Doc and Lew P are having a Murphy’s at Bar A. They want to watch the Jets versus the Saints with loud company. Probably so when they use totally nasty language they will blend in.

Drew Breese is a cute and good, and the Jets are in trouble, but that’s not my problem until a Mad Mutt comes home to commiserate. Maybe that would not be so bad, as long as he comes home alone. We don’t need Lew P documenting.

Personally I’d rather watch Mark Sanchez’s little tush waddle to the line at home in Mutt’s flannel lumber jack shirt and sweat pants. But what I’m looking for in a football game on television is different than what the guys watch.

Hey, Mark warm them hands before you put them down there. No wonder they’re jumping before the snap. Go Jets.

What I did to get the computer for myself, was program a little crash into the fifth boot up after Wednesday. That happened Saturday night while Mutt tried to access WebMD.

The boys, who have no idea how to fix the computer, left that in my hands. Simple emergency boot, and a correction to directory and the hard drive, and the Tinkinator is at the wheel, so come along for the totally awesome ride.

I have a story about last Sunday. I knew I was in for a long day because our friends Kim and Ralph Nozzle had invited us their son’s wedding. We had been to their house for Thanksgiving once, and they always invite their childhood friends, the Phatfanny family, Dim-ass, Pill & their son 20 Watts.

The Phatfannys are not easy people to get along with, and I always check to make sure Mutt isn’t packing the Colt when the Nozzles invite us over. I’m not sure if that’s because he’ll use it. Or, I might be tempted. I’m peaceful, but the Phatfannys are … annoying. That is the PC answer.

Phuck-phaces? I didn’t say that. You read it wrong. It’s not a typo.

No matter the occasion, the Nozzles put us at the same table as the Phatfannys who are gratuitously insulting perpetually. Maybe we are the only ones who haven’t complained about them yet, so we are sacrificed.

Before we left the house, Mutt was put off. The Sunday Star Ledger missed a delivery. He initially accused me of not paying the bill, but it’s on the credit card and automatic so … sometimes, when he’s worked up he has a hair trigger temper, and between the Star Ledger and the Phatfannys, well you get the picture. Like the time he walked into the woods alone with the FBI agent following him, totally irrational, that’s what is loveable about the Spring Lake Heights Crusader, delusional passion. Back to the story.

We called the customer service people and as usual they were pleasant. They offered a replacement copy. The delivery would come between 10 AM and approximately never. Since this has happened about once every three months, we know never is a more likely time than 10 AM.

That was the case Sunday, but they delivered a Sunday paper, Monday with the Monday paper. I guess the delivery guy held it hostage. The ransom for the Sunday Ledger, 125 cents, and the way the paper is shrinking not worth it.

The really interesting part is that the same guy delivers the New York Times as the Star Ledger. Invariably, we get one and not the other, but it is never both that are MIA. The talent involved in not delivering half a standing order is mindboggling. No comics to read this weekend, boo. Doc was not happy.

We had to start dressing around 3:30 because of the drive to Roxbury where the wedding would be held.

Of course, the Ledger was nowhere to be seen before we left. Mutt went into Sunday sports section withdrawal, and that is an awesome spectacle of puffing, followed by the holding of the breath, leading into punching walls or doors, and the finale, throwing himself on the bed naked after the shower, kicking his feet and making everything jiggle from head to toes.

I’d call it childish, but I don’t want to insult children everywhere. They are not that immature.

Having Doc naked on the bed is not a problem for me, I’ve always enjoyed making the four-poster squeak, but because of the time element, there was not any time to take real advantage of the situation, or him.

Foreplay? No time for two-play. Even mind play was out, a flash fantasy maybe, but like a haiku fantasy, at the most contained in twenty words.

Mutt was in a snit about wearing a monkey suits and a cummberous-bund, but he looks so handsome and adorable in that black and white attire that it is worth putting up with the grousing. Since he dropped 25 pounds, we’ve shortened the cummerbund four inches. Sometimes women give him the eye, a new experience for both of us.

I need only shoot him pixie love dust with a glance, add a compliment. Bingo, the snit resolves, with a “Do I really look like Sean Connery in Dr. No?”

Men can be so foolish.

They held the wedding in Roxbury New Jersey, which is more than an hour’s drive from the Jersey shore when there is no traffic. This was Sunday night, like a total disaster, and to make matters worse, a tractor-trailer decided to imitate a half-opened jack-knife lying on its side.

Frozen Perdue roasters scattered over the Turnpike looking like a mass exodus from a Portuguese Churrascaria prior to roasting. The clean up would have been faster, if each passing car was allowed to take a roaster home. For sitting 2 hours, stopped dead, on the pike, that’s the least they could do.

Mutt tried to make a u-turn but a state trooper wouldn’t let him pull-it off. That’s the best I can do for a poultry joke, excuse me, a paltry joke.

We would not have taken a chicken, because they were not formally dressed. I could have used one as a bustle maybe. You know that thing ladies wore in the 1880’s to give them a bubble butt. The more things change the more they stay the same. Yo Yo, booty call in the Victorian hood, you all. Just giving the antiques their props.

By the time we arrived at the wedding, the post ceremony reception had started. Mutt looked at the bright side saying, “At least our car was at the front of the valet section, because they filled from back to front. Easy exit. Less time with the Phatfannys.” Then he announced, “Phatfanny red alert.” He imitated a siren, as he left the Honda, and put on his tux jacket.

He wanted to leave. He is so totally blatant, the tact of a four year-old. Wait Jay would know not to say that, so there goes that theory.

When we sat at the table, with Pill Phatfanny next to me, I understood the emotion. Instead of hello, she said, “That old Honda have trouble making it all the way here from the shore? Our Benz has a GPS that’s works in real time. You understand real time as in computer speak? Thought not.”

This from a lady whose main accomplishment in life is avoiding a homosexual scandal in her boys scout troop by only letting the Moms be the troop leaders. She brought new meaning to the phrase, “Dem Mothers.”

Mutt, to his credit, smiled and replied, “Actually the Honda tried to chicken out on the Turnpike, because it perdued its nerve. Perdue as in French. You speak the language of the sophisticate, right?”

She looked to her husband Dim-ass and said, “I don’t get it.”

To which Mutt replied, “That’s obvious. When you look like the Crypt Keeper post-exsanguination, you’ll probably never get it. Unless there is a vacant trash bag available, and simultaneously, someone is truly desperate.”

I kicked him. He stopped and the Phatfannys turned to the couple on the other side of them and asked. “So, your daughter married a girl? Is that legal? How’s that working out? Our first grandchild is due in two months.”

The couple didn’t respond, and left the table to dance on the far side of the floor.

Mutt asked, “And who’s the father of your grandchild. Did they round up suspects yet?”

But they didn’t hear him. And I had to kick him under the table again.

“It was worth the pain.” He replied.

We left to introduce ourselves to the parents of the bride and groom, who were sitting nearby. Kim Nozzle brought us over to Patrick and Beverly Sprae.

A little while later the music stopped, and the bride and groom made their entrance. The couple in a gesture to modernity decided to hyphenate their names. They were introduced as Dr. and Mrs. Sprae-Nozzle.

It could have been Nozzle-Sprae.

He is a GU doctor. Maybe the married name is advertising.

“Have it adjusted by Dr. Sprae-Nozzle, and shoot only blanks without hazzle.”

The Phatfannys had a field day with the name but not within the hearing of their host and hostess. Dim-ass made several significantly off-color jokes involving the bride handling the new name, and what gauge nozzle, all of which combined a lack of class, taste, and sensitivity. He is the master at that.

After five tries without a single laugh from his audience, the Crypt Keeper pulled him to the dance floor.

On his return, he mentioned that the newlyweds were still looking for a house and would be living with her parents in Nutley for about 6 months. He railed about living with your relatives and not being a couple on your own.

“Where’s the maturity? How is that earning your way in life?”

He bragged how his son, 20 Watts – yes he’s not bright, less so than Dim-ass – lived on his own in New York with his fiancé. They have a luxury cooperative apartment on the West Side in the 80’s. It’s rent controlled and in the family since the pilgrims touched Plymouth Rock.

They boasted how their son is in an allied field to the bridegroom, and can afford his rich digs.

However, if memory serves the Tinkinator right, his son inherited his apartment from a dead uncle who had no children and made his money manipulating stocks in the 70’s. He left that money to Pill and Dim-ass, but he left the apartment with a trust fund to pay rent to 20 Watts.

Dim-ass is less forth coming with his son’s occupation. They talk about how he got into Cornell, but elected not to matriculate. Instead, he followed the pipeline into other career opportunities.

I am not sure how being a plumber is an allied field to being a GU physician. Both are honest lines of work, but apparently, plumber does not meet the threshold for Dim-ass or Pill to mention, at least not specifically.

Honesty has never been allowed to get in the way of the Phatfanny stories. They boasted that 20 Watts’ fiancé is studying animals and is interested in becoming a veterinarian.

I’m interested in flying without a plane, but I am incapable of that feat at this time. She’d have a better chance of becoming a vegetarian. But the vegetables might out smart her.

During the salad portion of the meal, he asked Doc if his life story had been published yet. Doc replied it’s being proofed and needed some editing before it was published. Lew P will start pitching it in November.

Pill volunteered, “I thought as much, because I haven’t seen it mentioned on the New York Times best-seller list.” When she crinkles her nose, her skin looks like used tissue paper, and her sneer is straight from Cruella De Vil. “Not even in the paperback section.”

She didn’t ask for an ARC copy. I don’t think she can read anything other than tea leafs and graphic novels anyway. (That’s graphic not gothic. In gothics the plot would be to hard for her to follow.)

Dim-ass bragged about being written about as an artist – he makes fancy sausage and other stuffed meats – and that led to his editors demanding that he write articles about the experience.

“I’m published in several magazines. Right now, as of this very moment, multiple editors are sending me subjects to free lance via e-mail.”

“What do you write about?” Mutt asked between bites of salad.

“My area of expertise. The modern use of principles from the industrial revolution in making salami and bologna.”

Doc muttered, “I knew he was a bologna expert.”

His e-mail address must be fifty_percent-bugsnrats_Sin_Lewis@asshole.ditz

I grabbed Doc to dance, which is a major victory, because in that monkey suit he feels like a gigolo. He thinks that dancing draws attention to that sleazy image. He won’t tango and the only Paris he knows is followed by the name of a former hotel chain, but he had been filled to the hilt on Phatfanny stories.

To me he is Fred Upstairs, and we won’t talk about who he is down stairs. I remain a lady.

When we got back to the table, the main course had been served. Dim-ass announced over his Roast Beef, “I haven’t got me a good piece of meat in ages.” Then he looked at Pill. She blushed. I guess embarrassing anyone works for him.

Pill then launched into a story about Pam. Several years ago 20 Watts saw her at a shore bar and thought she was trolling – the episode includes his failed attempt to pick her up. Apparently, Pam was dressed fashionably for the bar scene.

This story, which has been retold every time we meet is not only growing old, but isn’t even original – the lesser light told it first, and poorly. The story should have died a natural death, but like a zombie is perpetuated at the most opportune time to embarrass my Doc.

I had had enough. So had several people at the table. “Every time I hear that story I wonder, what was a happily engaged man like 20 Watts doing in a pick up bar at the shore, while his fiancé worked the weekend as an assistant pet groomer at Dog R Us. He travels from New York for what, variety? By the way, how do they tell her apart from the dog she’s grooming.”

Mutt spit up his white wine when I said that, and then said, “A toast to the meek inheriting the earth, while the boastful and bragging live with what little they have and boast of it. May we always know the difference between true friends and the entitled without a real time GPS – Good People Scanner.”

Everyone at the table raised a glass, although the Phatfannys were slow to do so.

Our host and hostess still don’t get it. The Phatfannys are unhappy people who must tear others down to make themselves appear large.

Their pear-shaped bodies, a species’ trait, should allow for an enlarged brainpan within their fat fannies for the functioning section of their brain. That area appears spacious, vacuous, and cavernous.

They must be like the first IBM computers that took up a room and functioned no better than a handheld phone does today. The Phatfannys are the human equivalent of Univac I, and in today’s world, they are competing with smaller, smarter, and faster versions. Their statements come from the pure bitterness of being obsolete, and non-competitive.

Doc’s home from Bar A. He says, “Next time, he will blog on Lance and the creature from the wild rose bramble. The damn Leary cat still lives.”

Apparently it was a long game and they had quite a few Murphy’s. He went straight to the bathroom. It’s been five minutes and I haven’t heard a flush yet.
“Hey big guy don’t fall in.” LOL.

I’m not Mad and I am certainly no Mutt. The loo is a British bathroom and so pee belongs there, not on the computer. I am the Tinkinator, and I’ll be back.

Another Pleasant Starbuck’s Thursday. Wasn’t that a song?

2009-09-27T19:49:00.000-04:00

Spent part of Thursday morning at Starbuck’s with Lew P. While he is ok company, he acts like he knows me from the inside out. I met him a short while ago, not more than two years. It’s not like he created me, is it? Some guys, huh?

DOE’s, Doctors of Everything, they know it all, you have to foul them up to keep them on their toes. Slip them a tidbit of information that they don’t know, and make them think. Like Biden’s brain surgery. He had an aneurysm. People forget that fact, and it explains a lot about the Vice-President. He’s brain damaged, for real.

His neurosurgery must have been computer-guided to be performed in such a confined and miniscule space. Biden’s brainpan, he’s a size three hat. Know what I mean.

Another American medical innovation, the surgeon used an electron microscope for neurosurgery, an advance way beyond stereotactic surgery.

I guess you can tell Dr. Muttnick plays for the elephants, a Republican. Back when I was in private orthopedic practice I worked for peanuts; that’s why most physicians are Republicans. No that is not an Urban Legend, it’s a fact jack.

Or maybe you just let the DOE’s know, you know who they really are. With Lew P it is easy. I asked him if he had been published yet. He hadn’t so what kind of writer can he be? He says an unpublished novelist.

Tink requested that I be diplomatic. He’s an unpublished scribbler, linking events without a theme. He is to writing what Jackson Pollack was to art. Hemingway is Rembrandt, and Lew P. is Pollack. He swears it is different in his novels compared to this blog. From my experience as a character in both settings, it is.

In the novels, I know my dramatic purpose, and so does he, but you never see the author getting shot or having a stroke in the novels. I guess, they reserve that fate for after the novel is published, and the author gets his first royalty check.

Self inflicted wound, or cardiac arrest?

A few lesser lights at the hospital have been published, although in fairness, it was in second-rate medical journals, like The Journal of Irreproducible Facts. They hadn’t published fiction, at least they won’t admit to publishing fiction, medical or otherwise. They call it research. I call it bull droppings, with a dose of imagination.

A self-style savant, Dr. Mack. U. Seow, has written several books on surgical history and also business acumen, but he is gone now. One of his patients popped a question that punctured his ego and he blew up like a balloon. He was never seen on the Jersey shore again. Rumor has it that he moved to New York City where he can re-inflate (read re-invent) himself.

I was in Nam. A whole bunch of writers came out of there. I like the hardboiled works of Michael Connelly, and Robert B. Parker. They write about guys, men who have been there, not physicians who forgot how to shoot straight.

Arthur’s taking me to Sea Girt to practice with the Colt, but until then I’m part of the physicians who can’t shoot straight. I did once, but not now, and it’s a shame. There is nothing to compare with the joy of squeezing off four or five rounds into a target. To remain PC we’re talking bull’s eye targets, not animate, although if the creature from the wild rose bramble would show itself ….

I practiced orthopedics for eighteen years before Lew P even found me. Still, he’s an all right guy, if you go for that kind. Let’s you know whether he likes you or not right out, straightforward.

Still can’t call him a man’s man. Doubt he ever shot a gun, even an air gun. He thinks BB’s are the row after AA. He thinks AA is the row after Z. He’s afraid of a straw and wadded paper spitball, and he doesn’t drink much Murphy’s either. So he doesn’t know his BB from his AA.

Hemingway would chew him up and make Grappa out of him. Or maybe use that damn shotgun on him. Oops there goes my PC right down the tubes.

His sentences are so long, Papa would probably shoot him just for that. Lew P’s two daughters are prettier than anything Earnest produced, as a first or second-generation sire. Smarter too. So we cut Lew P a minor break.

Instead of Murphy’s Stout, I think Lew P. is a wine drinker. Is it wino or whiner? Or is he two wines in one? Like that mint advertisement several years ago. Certs, no he is more ticky-tacky than a cert-ive.

How can wine be a smart drink, it doesn’t have a head. Instead of a head it has a bouquet. No man wants to trade his head for a bouquet, like some debutante.

I know some people who have nothing in their heads. An empty head is better than no head, although, anencephaly, being born without a brain, is immediately fatal, at least in the medical books. Some of the Hollywood celebrities, lately, demonstrated that the textbooks are wrong. The things they do, they couldn’t have functioning brains.

Pour that Murphy’s down the side and it is smarter than most of Hollywood, with a head that stands up for itself. Didn’t Mel Gibson claim that it wasn’t his fault and his head just stood up by itself. He had no control over it on that beach in Costa Rica. It’ll cost him more than a few Rica’s by the time he’s through. Couldn’t happen to a more worthy subject.

Lew P mentioned that his nephew won an Emmy for being a writer on the Daily Show. But he lives on the East Coast so that makes him bright, and not a celebrity. He can write, so that immediately disqualifies him from living near Los Angeles.

Does smog affect brain function?

Writers aren’t celebrities, they are … er … writers and no one knows who they are, unless they go to the Manalapan Headquarters of the Monmouth County Library to hear Lew P’s nephew speak on October 3^rd, 2009 at 2 PM.

The boys at the cock’n’bull session all raised a cup of Latte to his achievement. If we weren’t at Starbucks, Mutt might have order a round of Murphys’ for the boys, but they don’t stock that. It would take up the room in the cooler meant for the hard Blueberry Scones and the crummy coffee crumb-cakes.

More importantly, they would need a liquor license, and we don’t need to make Corzine’s Cronies richer. Tax the poor and the rich and give the money to a son of an #itch. We’re trying to maintain that PG rating.

The only problem the state of New Jersey has is that McSpeedy, Corzine (remember his 90 mph accident on his way to the Imus disaster with the Rutgers women’s basketball team) is being challenged by McGreedy, Christie (he loans money to other politicians, charges interest and doesn’t declare it on taxes, while he was the state attorney general? Esquire my ass.) meaning our next governor will have shifty-beady eyes either way.

Tink says, “Absolute dworks toast with decaffeinated Lattes. Not awesome, but bore some.” It’s the thought that counts and not the buzz from the drink. Elliot congratulations and keep up the good work.

Tink also thinks Lew P brings some class to the table, but she wears five earrings in the cartilage of her right ear. I love the Pixie, but class is not the forte of my babe or me. Blue collar and blue jeans, and Blue Moon, the song or the beer, that’s what I am talking about.

The cock ‘n’ bull sessions put things in perspective. Dr. Bowel came by and sat down. Just as Lew P. arrived, Manley Eskwire left. He is a friend of Dr. Bowel and an acquaintance therefore of Lew P. Me, the Mad Mutt, I don’t know him an inch or a mile.

I think he’s a retired poker player who now supports himself by practicing the law. His training was bluffing Dolly Doyle and Crazy Mike, so getting past a judge or a jury is a piece of cake. Maybe he can advise the winner of the Gubernatorial election? They both have a lot of bluffing to do.

All of us know that life needs a laugh along the way, and Lew P sees life with a crooked sense of vision. Manley calls him the Devil’s Advocate, but coming from a lawyer that’s almost sour grapes, which gets us back to wine.

That bottle of Korbel that went missing New Years, I never completed the story. It was found in Jayson’s room and Pam had a kitten, but not Mrs. Leary’s cat, which was keening outside in the bramble most of January first.

Jayson said he liked the label on the champagne bottle. He said it without hiccupping.

Tink took the bottle away, and Svettie made a dogface that meant she knew how Jay got it. So the mystery is solved, but Pam is missing the happy ever after part.

Jay didn’t visit the bathroom much January 1^st so I think he got an empty bottle. That’s a good thing, because Svettie is wearing thin on Pam who asked to go to Sea Girt with Arthur and I. She wants to borrow the Colt. Svettie could predict the trajectory of the fired bullet as she is a rocket scientist.

Even Tink thought Svettie, her sister, might have overstayed her welcome. Svettie blasted off to Boston and the Aerospace Engineering Lab at MIT the next day. Why does a rocket scientist need a GPS to find Boston from New Jersey? Another question to which I don’t know the answer.

Back to now. We’re sitting outside of Starbucks on the patio enjoying the late summer heat, 78 degrees, and shooting the cock’n’bull. Not with a gun, with our mouths. You can imagine how much cock’n’bull is chatted when you realize the participants are three old physicians and a poker-playing lawyer.

Sum total four DOE’s without restraints.

Lew P wanted to talk about his Jets and the victory over New England, but since Dr. Bowel is a Giant fan, and Manley would only be interested in football if he could bet it, the conversation died before Mutt could start a J-E-T-S Jets Jets Jets cheer. I guess will have to change the name back to Jets from Jests, since they are doing so well.

Arthur, my FBI friend, continues to talk about the Mets, because his Phillies are doing better than the Philadelphia Beagles.

You think they are the Philadelphia Eagles, no. They are a bunch of dogs. And with Michael Vick as your quarterback he’ll violate parole if he rejoins the team.

The Tennessee Titans came into the Meadowlands like lions, but left as tamed moutons (French for lambs). I had to fumble around for that bad pun.

All hail King Rex. We’re relyin’ on Ryan. Go JETS, and next week NO Saints.

Manley was hot that the poker tournament at Atlantic City was on the weekend of the eve of Yom Kippur. He didn’t want to gamble on the holiest day of the year. That led everyone to believe that the really high rollers aren’t Jewish.

Myer Lansky would turn over in his grave.

Oh almost forgot, the on going saga of the creature from Mutt’s wild rose bramble. Sounds like a 1950’s grade B horror movie.

Lance came back and all three traps were empty. There was no bait and no capture. He probed the hole and it doesn’t go in more than 2 feet, so it is probably not a den or lair. He thinks the creature lives in the rocks that he couldn’t move, because they are too deep in the bramble, and too large.

He also thinks that the traps captured field mice or other small mammals, and they were a buffet for the creature from the wild rose bramble.

We await Lance’s next move, but he thinks that Mrs. Leary’s cat is lucky, because what ever the creature from the wild rose bramble is, it is a carnivore.

I guess if I don’t rescue that gib then my problem with the keening at night will solve itself. Most carnivorous snakes and mammals are nocturnal feeders. If the snake is big enough, it can devour the whole kitty. A wild dog would have a field day.

Something won’t allow me to let that castrato suffer more than he has. He lost his testicles, a eunuch experience. To compensate, he has become too big for his britches. It sounds like a non sequitur, but it is an accurate statement. Think about it.

Using my theory of deflating puffed up DOE’s, I’ll tell him that he’s firing blanks at all his bitches. Then he’ll stop calling attention to himself, like a pimp who has lost all his working girls.

I’m taking up a collection for replacement of my cashmere coat. Crawling in the brambles to rescue the capon, it is getting dirty too frequently. I have to find a solution, and soon.

Black Racer Snake - constrictor carnivore.

I am the Mad Mutt, and you are not, so what do you care.

Jayson, Arthur, Lance and Mutt on the dreary dreary horrible day.

2009-09-19T14:38:00.013-04:00

The image was obtained at www.alanamous.com/page/2 on sept. 20th 2009.

The sky blanketed us with the dirty fleece of a grubby lamb. Gray shadows wrapped Jersey shore, everywhere. We waited for the wash water from the sky to cleanse us, and make the day better. But God held back the heavenly rinse cycle. We got heavy clouds, but no rain.

The demons of autumn honed the air to an edge the summer can’t possess and the chill invaded our sweaters. Despite our best efforts, autumn toddled nearer like a child learning to walk. Is that why they call it the fall?

Jay had a half-day at Kindergarten, and Lance dropped by to look into the bramble. We were his audience as he investigated what lived under my wild rose bramble.

He wore a gray-green ski cap over his shaven head. I am not sure why young guys shave their heads but it is the style, and who would argue with Kojak. Can they all be going pre-maturely bald?

He knelt, probing deeper into the brambles, while modeling pants styles for plumbers. Jay giggled seeing Lance’s heinie, covered his mouth with one tiny hand, and pointed vigorously with the other. He followed the etiquette of a Kindergartener.

During this earth shaking moment, Arthur Frank drove up in, what else, a Crown Vic with government plates. Did President Ford sign an exclusive contract with his namesake to supply government vehicles? I wonder if President O’Bummer rides in a Ford? His car must have a webcam camera, so he won’t lose airtime.

Arthur, military and FBI, commented that I looked like the mangy mutt today. I just haven’t had time to get to Mike the Barber. We call him that to distinguish him from Conan the Barbarian. They are twins separated at birth like Arnold and Danny. Mike did not grow up to be the governor of California or a Terminator. He's registered safe with scissors, so sleeping in the chair isn't a risk.

My Isro looks more like a Rasta do than a kosher mop. Tink has started calling me Marley. Jay wants to know why she uses a dog’s name for me.

Art yelled to me, “Boyo, going over to Sea Girt to pop off a few rounds. Want to come?”

“Watchin’ Jay, don’t want him around loud noises. The M1911A is broken down for cleaning anyway.”

I did not want Jayson to hear the word gun or Colt, as he had a fascination with them when his mother was an active FBI agent. He learned Colt .45 as the name of my gun when I brought it back home after being shot. For his safety, and he is a curious George if there ever was one, the Colt stays locked in the floor safe of the shore house.

He played cowboys and Indians up to 3 months ago, hiding in closets and ambushing me with a cap pistol. The first time, almost gave me another stroke, but now he plays secret agent. Less loud noises and surprises, so I fully expect to live another year or two, and not face a sudden traumatic medical episode. No pacemaker needed at this time.

Tink played a DVD of Dr. No for him on a rainy day, and now he wants to go undercover. When we walk Bubs at the shore, he runs on the beach and hunts for conch shells like they did in the movie. At the Jersey shore, he’s more likely to find small shells, old syringes, and used condoms. Just kidding, that was the old Ciba-Geigy days at the shore. The beaches have been especially clean and beautiful this summer. On a scale of 0 to 10, beach cleanliness was a 9.

My favorite character in Dr. No

is obvious. But what man who was a teenager during the release of this movie could feel otherwise. To quote Tink, "WOWZER. Ursula Undressed, I mean Andress.

Because of the James Bond attitude, Pam bought Jayson a video game Golden Eye Rogue Agent. He plays the video game as often as he watches the Telebubbies and Sesame Street. So the less talk about shooting guns the better.

Culture shock meets childhood with a bang. He hasn’t asked for a child-sized tuxedo, and he can’t seem to learn the rules to Baccarat Chemin de fer.

He dressed Bubs as a French secret agent. The dog seemed to like the disguise thinking she was human, hidden, and unrecognizable.

Maybe she likes the human pup enough to put up with all his silliness. She never had a litter, maternal instincts and all that.

In another salute to 007, Tink claims last New Year’s Eve Jay developed a taste for the bubbly. Her spinster sister, Svetlana Angelucci was visiting at the time, (her first name has been changed to protect the humor).

A bottle of Korbel Brut was missing in action on January 2nd, but I think Svettie requisitioned it for her room after watching the ball drop in Times Square. She needed something inanimate with which to cuddle. She doesn't do well with living, feeling things, like dogs, and cats, and especially humans. I think she might be better with aliens, not the Mexicans who work in the restaurants but the aliens from Neptune ... not Neptune NJ, but Interstellar Neptune, as in Mars, Venus, because she is out of this world and works to put people out of this world. More on that later.

Jay wasn’t hung over the next day, and it was a whole bottle. Once a Marine Military Police Investigator, always solving crimes. Maybe the sisters shared it before I woke up to watch the football games on January 1^st – go Rutgers - who knows, who cares.

Maybe it was Svettie who gave Jay his first taste that night. She’d do it for a laugh, like giving catnip to a cat and watching.

Wouldn’t put it past her. Pam would kill the interloper if she knew. She has gone with Art and I to Sea Girt and out shot the both of us, and Art is marksman rated with a handgun. My rating is below that, significantly.

New Years Eve, Tink and I were snuggling on the couch from 11:30 PM to 3:00 AM January 1^st. We didn’t need champagne. The bubbles of champagne disturb my eyebrows. When you pass 55 years old, your eyebrows grow so long they curl like Shirley Temple’s hair and develop nerves that can sense the wind from a tsunami in Japan while standing at the Jersey shore. The bubbles are annoying. Ask Andy Rooney. Mike the Barber charges 2 bucks extra and uses a lawnmower to trim them.

Tink likes them long, claiming it’s fun to brush them against the grain. I put up with that but … You can see my problem with the eyebrows, not to mention the tongue.

I think Tink is in denial as to why all the Murphy’s Stout was gone 24 hours after her sister’s arrival. The Chardonnay went next, 6 bottles in 3 days. I didn’t up my intake, although her sister gave everyone orders, and therefore I had justification.

She even had Bubs fetching things for her, and we never taught Bubs to fetch. She’s a poodle not a retriever. That’s like asking a Jewish American Princess to do the laundry, by hand, in the river, on a stone.

Svettie got on Bubs nerves to the point where she brought me the beret and glasses, scratched the floor begging me to put them on her. Stupid poodle, like that would help.

Svettie threw Lew P off the computer while he and I were going over a scene for the Fatal Blow, so that she could read her e-mails. She had brought her laptop with her and the shore house has wifi. She didn’t want to go up to her dormer bedroom (yeah, I can’t stand sleeping and living on the same floor with her), and get her computer. She tried to figure out how to tell Bubs to pick it up without teeth marks, but the canine was having none of that. So she sent Lew P to Siberia for a half hour, while the pleasant sound of “You’ve got mail” played from the desktop.

Worse yet, after making large amounts of alcohol disappear, Svetlana can walk a straight line and talk normally, which means she’s had practice, probably on straight Vodka, hence the name.

The way to tell the booze has affected her is the subtle degree of hostility increase. From yes to yeah what, and from please to the royal command of do it, i.e. “Doc is that you who just came in from raking leaves? Bring my glass of wine here. I’m watching Oprah.”

We’ll cut her a break since her four-year relationship with a guy who worked for Bear-Stearns went up in smoke. Truly that is what happened. They caught him smoking the weed in the men’s room and he was fired, right before everyone at Bear-Stearns was fired or absorbed. He is unemployed and she refuses to support him with her job as a computer programmer for NASA.

Yup, a polluted rocket scientist destroying the ozone, and creating ethanol breath.

Back to our dreary, dreary day, Arthur picked up on not using the word gun or Colt, and walked from the car to the yard to see what made Jay giggle. From the street, he couldn’t see Lance’s heinie buck in and out of the brambles in a very obscene manner. Jay was too young to understand, but I had a chuckle, as he lunged in and out of the bush, grabbing rocks and placing them near his feet.

Repetitively, Lance on his knees, springing forward to straight, reaching his arms over his head into the center of the bramble, and pulling back to a compact size, carrying rocks to pile near his shoes. The upper half of his body disappeared and appeared in a steady rhythm. The gray ski cap on his baldhead only added to the effect of safe bramble probing.

When Arthur made it to the corner of the house he stopped. It took him 20 seconds to understand what he saw. A smile percolated onto his face, as he reached the same suggestive conclusion as I. Old men, and the gutter, constant companions, hey. Those who can’t do, teach. I remember that adage from my residency in orthopedics. For old men, those who can’t do, well they just keep thinking about it, but …

“That half-exposed heinie belongs to Lance.” I said, “Something, a snake, a field mouse, a shrew lives in the bramble. Mrs. Leary’s cat thinks it’s something good to eat. I am getting tired of that pseudo-lion being ensnared by my roses. Lance is the MPI of animal control. Unlike the official county people, he has no rules, just like us in Nam.”

“What’s he going to do with it when he catches it?” Art asked.

“If it’s a snake he’ll keep in his zoo/farm. If it’s a mammal, I guess it’s food for the farm. I’m finished crawling in that briar. That’s all I know.”

Jayson said, “Granddaddy looks like a baby when he crawls in there, but his heinie is covered.” Then he whispered to Art. “But granddad’s butt is bigger.”

Art mumbled, ”military, they teach you to CYA, all the time, unlike plumbers.”

“Jay, I had more time to develop my ass.”

Jay laughed loudly. “Grand dad said a bad word. I’m telling mommy you said that.”

“That’s ok, just don’t tell Tink.”

Jayson raised a puzzled look and turned to see Lance putting out traps around the entrance to the creature’s den. He baited each of them with different foods.

“That should do her.” Lance said, as he climbed from his knees to his feet. He dusted off his knees, and wiped his hand across his bald pate, pushing back his ski cap, grabbing it and squeezing it like a wet wash cloth. “Now we just wait.”

He walked away from the bramble, but never bothered to tug up his pants. They made his butt look as flat as an ice pond. He never looked back as he climbed into his Mustang.

I stopped Jayson from giggling and told him that wasn’t polite, but I had trouble keeping a straight face.

Art said, “He shouldn’t expose his brains to the sunlight, might dry them out completely.”

I countered, “Guess it’s his lucky day, no direct sun. Want to go inside and heft a Murphy’s or two?”

“Got go to Sea Girt, need the scores to stay employed. See ya soon.”

So Art left and Jay ran back in the house. It was no surprise that Rogue Agent blasted from the television set in the den when I followed him in.

The Mad Mutt and the horrible, dreary, desolate, desultory, but not dampened day.

I am the Mad Mutt, be grateful that you are not.

Unsung real heroes, the Big Owl, and Anti-heroes who were well-sung long ago

2009-09-16T15:19:00.012-04:00

Lew P and I were shooting the breeze at a Starbucks near the hospital and the new annex where I have a consultation office. He’s too busy writing to see patients and I’m too busy seeing consults to take a longer lunch.

I’d prefer a hero from Sorrento’s Subs I’d accept one from Jersey Mike’s . I’d buy one from Subway , if that were the only option. A hero is a hero.

But we’re sitting al fresco, enjoying the fresh New Jersey air, lattes, and croissant sandwiches, real effete New Yorker type stuff, not big and bold macho like a New Jersey hero-sub dripping in vinegar, basil and oil. The type that leaks on and ruins your Salvatore Ferragamo tie , but you still don’t care. To make matters worse, they don’t serve Murphy’s at Starbucks. They should, but they don’t. Murphy’s Stout .

My friend Dr. Bowel joins us, and the three of us are yakking away. Dr. Bowel had a break in his schedule, looking up people’s poop way. He does from the top down and the bottom up. He doesn’t realize GI tracts are a one-way street running only south. He’s good, and he does mine when I run out of excuses and actually take care of my health.

That’s when Lew P started talking about heroes. Arthur Frank, my friend at the FBI, everyone calls him a hero when his work is known, because it can be life and death. Police, firemen all are heroes for us.

Doctors like Dr. Bowel are heroes too. Not because he has been a patient and fights back everyday, not letting his disease win. He is a hero, because he works with people who are infectious as well as sick. Physicians qualify as heroes because they put themselves at risk for the betterment of those they treat.

Patients ignore this fact because it is a doctor’s job, and expected, but it is still fact. Doctors have to be ready to be exposed to risk 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Our little group was doing the cock’n’bull thing, talking about President O’Bummer, and his vast television exposure. Omnipresent – ala FDR and radio in the 30’s. Those who don’t recognize history relive it daily, political Altzheimers.

We will not debate whether he is a hero or not here. Dr. Bowel and Lew P beat that horse to Russian stew over the lattes. Talk to your loved ones about that during Thanksgiving or watch the Cowboys on television; he’ll probably pre-empt them. I refuse to fix the broken bones, which will surely be the end result of a passionate political discussion.

While we are talking and being very political – read emotional and passionate – out of the blue walks Dr. Big Owl. Dr. Big Owl is a hero and people don’t have any idea how courageous he is.

He looks like any other large human, oversized brown horn rimmed glasses with round lenses ala Sally Jesse Raphael. He is barrel-chested, with long straight brown hair neatly tied in a ponytail that splits his shoulder blades. He lumbers with a rolling waddle to his gait that makes you think of a Sasquatch.

Source of Sasquatch photo.

But he is hardly inarticulate or sub-human or that hairy. He is a hero.

He wears a swatch watch, his high school class ring, and a pocket full of pens – see physician’s phobias about running out of ink in the Fatal Blow – without a pocket protector. The pens are mainly Bics and Paper Mates. He wears knit-ties not Ferragamo’s. Just an average joe, but he is a hero, making this Mad Mutt feel like a wannabe.

The Mad Mutt wants to make things right and correct injustice. That is why I became a doctor. My karma needs the balance of doing good, not that I was any worse than any other human, but I felt that need.

I was a hero once, and that was when I practiced orthopedics full time with full surgical privileges. The general public doesn’t realize how heroic doctors were in the 1970’s and 1980’s when less was understood about HIV – AIDS. The physician was at risk for infection by the undetected or non-declaring positive tester. The transmission of HIV from patient to physician was not as publicized as the transmission the other way. The infection roadway was and is a two directional street.

Do not take this blog’s meaning the wrong way, I have empathy for both the positive tester and those exposed but not yet positive. My concept of a good doctor includes empathy for the patient, whether they have a cold or cancer, and for everything in between those two diagnoses.

Maybe I’m just an ole Mad Mutt, but physicians are the guardians of the most precious treasure a human can own, good health. They are always fighting, as the guys in the white hats, to prolong a patient’s health. But in order for them to do so, they put themselves at risk.

This is a fact that the patients ignore. When a doctor leans down and listens to the chest of the patient with pneumonia, he breathes in that patient’s air. He is risking contracting that virus or bacteria and thereby getting that pneumonia.

When a physician spends time touching and closely examining a sick human he has no protective shield that guarantees him immunity. The sicker the patient, and the more complex the clinical presentation, the longer the physician must spend in proximity to the patient.

In other words, the worse and more hidden the problem, the greater the risk to the doctor, and the longer the exposure for him, the larger the amount of courage he demonstrates in treating that patient.

Compare this to the insurance company executive whose greatest fear daily is whether someone parked in his space, or will the executive dining room’s lunch be served on time. Is this Duck L’Orange . subtly over cooked? Where is that white wine? Heroic questions if I ever heard one.

Big Owl goes one step further than the average physician; he is an Infectious Disease Specialist. That means he treats patients that can give him a disease all day and all night. He is the one running the HIV – AIDS clinic at the hospital.

They draw bloods and treat with IV medications, both of which expose the staff and the physicians to risks that the general population can ignore – blood products. So the real heroes are the workers and physicians who man that clinic.

“But they are just doing their job man.” The whine of the ingrate public who can’t appreciate the risks of a soldier in the war against disease.

Big Owl must also be a masochist, because he is a Jets fan. But that is a psychological impairment, not physical. If he caught it from anyone, it was from his father. There maybe a genetic basis or predisposition to that disease. It is not infectious, as I have been unable to make Jayson a Jets fan. He and his mom bleed Giant blue. The cure for Big Owl and me is a quick dose of Rex Ryan, given visually, and via the auditory meatus.

The thought of Big Owl and the risks of HIV transmission to the surgeon during surgery made me remember someone who I thought was a hero, Dr. Lorraine Day. While Mutt and Lew P were training to be orthopedic surgeons, Lorraine was the chief of orthopedics at San Francisco General hospital. A victory in and of itself, because there weren’t any women heading up orthopedic departments even in Podunk at that time. She was a pioneer.

She detailed the risks of HIV transmission, especially during bloody trauma surgery. She used mathematical risk equations (actuarial tables) to demonstrate that the risk was higher than generally appreciated.

She dealt in science and proven cold facts.

She highlighted the courage and selflessness of trauma surgeons and surgeons in general. She worked in San Francisco where the density of HIV positive patients was higher than most other areas. She was a hero, apparently fearless.

It is 2009, not 1980, and I researched my hero for this blog. How disappointing to find that she resigned from her post and retired as an orthopedic surgeon in 1989, claiming the risk of HIV acquisition was too high and for her the stress was too great.

I guess even heroes have a threshold to discouragement. She was gallant for over ten years. I could still admire her during her retreat from the field of battle.

In 1992, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and showed courage in fighting that disease as a patient. She renewed my faith in her as a hero. She claimed after a recurrence and treating herself that she had gained another remission and probably was cured.

She has subsequently claimed to know the origin of cancer, and the optimal treatment for cancer. I will not dwell on the facts she presents because they are not what is important. She threw out the theories of western medicine and replaced them with hers. They include: “sugar is as addictive as cocaine” and “paralyzes the immune system for four hours.” She has stated that “the more milk you drink, the more osteoporotic you become.” These statements were taken from her biographical article on the Wikipedia web site.

On that site is a list of conspiracies to which Dr. Day is said to subscribe and my conclusion is that she has become paranoid. Maybe she always was, and my hero worship was misplaced even in the 1980’s. Back then, at times she spoke about HIV patients with significant distrust, hinting that they were involved in covering up their disease. Because of the stigma involved, at that time, who could blame them, apparently Dr. Day.

Finally she testified on behalf of Ernst Zündel (termed a neo-nazi, who was arrested in Canada for publishing literature, which "is likely to incite hatred against an identifiable group." He was considered a national security threat in Canada, and charged with inciting racial hatred in Germany.) In 2003, Dr. Day testified for his release from a Canadian prison, in which, he awaited deportation for trial in Germany on the charges of inciting racial hatred.

He is a Holocaust denier who claimed he cured his own terminal cancer using a method similar to the one that Dr. Day proclaims she discovered. It uses herbal treatments. She claimed the Canadian government was denying him access to the medicines, and thereby caused a relapse, in a covert attempt to kill him.

All this proves is that once a hero, not always a hero. Sometimes we misinterpret actions as heroic, when they were generated by intents and psychology that was different and unique in origin. We can only judge the actions and not the intent. Good results can eventuate from evil intent, or twisted logic; and certainly, bad results and disasters can occur when good intentions go awry.

Mutt says look no further than the Fatal Blow where killing Shark-face Neinstine to better the healthcare of the community seemed an immoral act with good results. An evil act contemplated for the best of reasons. When it finally happened, it was the twisted, evil mind of an egocentric person who accomplished the good deed. The action flowed from self-interest, not creating a better environment for the community. The murderer cannot be called a hero, because of the egocentric base to the action, yet the community benefited with the result. Go figure.

I wish Dr. Day health in the rest of her life. I hope that she can find the peace that she deserves, although a self-tortured soul can never escape its torturer. I hope in her zealot’s pursuit of her cause that she does not rob the precious gift of the chance of recovery from those who would believe in her, like some Ponzi healthcare scheme.

To be confident that a treatment can work enough times to make the probability of a successful treatment high, one must test the method in a population of significant size over a significant time period with a control group as a comparison, and long term follow up, years. Only when such testing is performed can a method be called scientifically proven to benefit the patient.

Scientific medical innovations move like a sloth, because if they ran like a Gazelle they would end badly too often. Mutt’s momma always said, “If it sounds to good to be true, it is.” Simple as that.

My former hero has bypassed the testing step. She has not used a statistically significant test population to prove her theory is successful, and therefore, even if she is right, she has become the seller of unproven dreams, and is listed on Quackwatch.org. ¹

Anecdotal endorsements from Jane Doe proves that it worked for Jane Doe or she really likes the seller or the seller paid her for her opinion. “I’m not a sick person but I play one on a web site?” Come on man.

Would you invest your money with Bernie, then why invest your health with ….

Heroes place themselves at risk for the betterment of others.

To place others at risk for the betterment of oneself makes you the anti-hero in my book.

In 2004 the National Advertising Division (NAD) of the Council of Better Business Bureaus reviewed Dr. Day’s infomercial used to promote Dr. Lorraine Day's "Cancer Doesn't Scare Me Any More" video in which she claims to have cured herself of metastatic breast cancer with a program featuring diet and prayer. They concluded in November 2004, that Dr. Stephen Barrett’s complaint was justified. Dr. Barrett is listed as a consumer advocate. ⁵

I have base all these statements on the information presented on the web and from Dr. Day’s web site as well as Wikipedia.

On her website, Dr. Day warns her critics that she will pray for them, but she promises that God will not deal punishment or retribution. Her enemies will reap what they sow. I sow the hope that scientifically proven methods of treatment are offer to every patient, and I preclude nothing except those methods that exclude the proven methods in favor of anecdotal dreams. Alternative medicine that can be used along side the proven treatments are welcome, even if the science is not proven yet, because they uphold the ultimate law of being a good physician. “First do your patient no harm.”

I’m just asking that she make an effort to become a hero again, and scientifically document that which she has discovered.

It has been proven scientifically that the immune system responds to positive emotional stimuli by responding more strongly to antigens. In stress the immune system responds in a diminished pattern. There is the science, go from there, but use that with proven theories, please, go and prove your theory, now.

I truly believe in visualization as a method to augment treatment of disease. It has been proven that laughing helps the recovery process in an objective way, via systematic study.

All I ask of Dr. Day is to prove that your system can be consistently successful by using objective testing and standards in a control environment over time.

No one is above the laws of nature and God. Not even his true prophets, ask Peter, ask Mohammed, ask Moses.

Back to Big Owl, he is a hero, as are the surgeons and the doctors who risk personal injury, disease and disability to make us healthy. They go under-appreciated because they are just doing their job. If they do it really well, then we never know how courageous they really are.

Thank a doctor today. You never know, you might need him tomorrow.

These links are used as reference concerning the information on Dr. Lorraine Day:

1. http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Cancer/day.html

2. http://www.drday.com/

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorraine_Day

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Zündel

5. http://www.infomercialwatch.org/reports/nadcomplaint.shtml

As always, I am the Mad Mutt. You are neither mad nor a mutt. Thank your lucky stars for that.

PS --> Lance was at the shore house Monday, and crawled into the rose bramble, more about that another time.

Maurice Clart-Biggons’ Cat and my bramble bush roses.

2009-09-13T12:37:00.003-04:00

Finally found out why Maurice Clart-Biggons’ cat is always getting caught in the rose bramble that separates his house from mine. There is an entrance to a creature’s den in the middle of the bush. The hole isn’t very big, and it’s covered partially by the rocks in the bramble, but the interest that feline has is insatiable. Like a city yuppie that plays camp-out in an RV with a king bed, and its own electric supply so he won’t have to give up his Wii, his Bose, his laptop, or miss an episode of Law and Order, the cat thinks it’s a jungle predator.

Early last evening, I once again played the knight rescuing that dumb mammal. It rewards me every time by trying to scratch me with its clawless paws. The black and gray gib, who lacks those nutty necessities that all males need to procreate, must also lack the brains to realize a four-inch thick body can’t squeeze through a two-inch wide hole, framed by thirty-year-old branches. The boughs are stronger than the gelded kitty, and hold him like a boa constrictor. They don’t squeeze him firm enough to stop that damned keening that announces his recidivistic idiocy, and capture.

Is there a mute switch on animals? That would solve all my problems, unless Tink discovered him trapped. She’d always command me to rescue his furry ass.

I am certainly not a cat person. Cats are as egocentric as my ex-wife, but twice as smart. My lawyer, our daughter Pam, has advised to guesstimate my ex’s intelligence that high, so as not to create a libelous situation. Therefore, I have used a gross over estimation. I reference as proof of her lack of intelligence: she married me.

Please take note that when I say cats as a plural it is distinguished from the Katz family who live in Lakewood. They are lovely. We’ve been to their house for Pesach once. Chicken soup with Matzo balls you could die for.

Anyone who has not been through a divorce, as an active participant, can’t know the emotions involved. So if I sound a little harsh, and come on strong, well, just get over yourself.

People, who have never lived in a glass house, probably don’t completely understand the use of curtains. For all you writers out there, show don’t tell takes on a new meaning when you live in a glass house or dance in a grass skirt, especially when like the Mad Mutt, you are twenty pounds overweight.

I am using the same restraint that I did with Shark-face Nienstine. Like my Colt at that time, I’m loaded. No haven’t touched the Murphy’s yet today. I’m loaded with emotions, but I’m not confined in my locked desk drawer. No, no, no; I’m out there.

At least I didn’t need the Colt to get my ex to sign the divorce papers. Using it was probably the only way to stop her from signing. I don’t think the toner from the Xerox was dry, before she gave it an autograph.

But I digress.

Yes, the divorce was not friendly, that conclusion is obvious. For over ten years Pam’s mother held an illegally gained restraining order against me, so that, I had no contact with her, Pam or Jayson, my grandchild.

Hell, I didn’t even know Jayson existed until the Fatal Blow, Lew P’s novel about my life. Some day I should thank my bearded colleague for re-uniting us. Maybe I could give him another story or two to write, and then we’d call it even. Especially, if his royalties beat his advance, and he shared.

Lew P keeps mumbling something about firing me, because I’m an iconoclastic curmudgeon who won’t cooperate. A freestanding character as the protagonist? Humbug. God I hate when writers talk writerese and stop communicating like humans. They become aliens from the planet Random House or something.

Tink and I have made up for lost time with Jayson and Pam, now that things are straightened out. During our most recent lap in the karmic soup that stews everyone until they are done, my daughter feels significant enmity towards her mother for depriving her, vindictively, of a father from age 16 to 26. My ex lied about my character, although no one would deny that I am one, only my most gross enemy would say I have none.

Getting back to that keening kitty that got stuck in my bramble – repeating that phrase reminds me of the song we sing to Jayson to get him laughing “the little ole lady who swallowed a fly” – Tink holds Bubs in the house, because the dog hates the cat more than I hate the ex-Mrs., Lorraine.

While Bubs is under house arrest, but barking and scratching the wood floors to get free. I crawl on all fours head first into the bramble to the hissing cat that raises her back hairs as if I were my dog. Maybe I carry Bubs’ scent, or maybe she’s just a misanthrope like the rest of her breed.

While I lift its body – gelded the pronoun his seems inappropriate. Wouldn’t use it for a capon either – up and out of the vee that has snared it, the stupid feline pummels my hands with her clawless paws. It’s like being hit with tiny pillows or getting a shiatsu massage with padded thumbs.

I’d laugh but my bouncing belly would be pierced by the rose thorns and deflate like a red balloon. The scratches from the thorns would make the cat think he had been successful warding off my attack, boosting its gelding ego. I won’t give that feline the satisfaction, same as I wouldn’t give my wife the shore house.

I’ll rescue that animal because that’s what I do best, but I would not sacrifice myself like it’s a human. I do that enough in the stories Lew P writes about me.

Damn authors always thinking they can control their characters, when it’s the characters that are required for the success of their writing. I mean, who do you think develops the plot. We live it. I know, he may have a theme, but who does all that dirty work, me. They should show us some respect and treat us as equals.

I guess Lew P does, because we are sharing this blog.

Getting back to that hole in the middle of my bramble. It looks like a snake hole. I thought from a far it could be a small mammals, like a shrew or a field mouse, but I think now it’s a snake hole.

My landscape person, Lance, they are no longer called gardeners, or the lawn guys, but a landscape person, collects snakes for his snake farm. He milks the venomous ones, and sells the collected milkings to companies that make anti-venom. He has five or six snake skins crazy glued to the dash of his car. He had to use crazy glue because the whole idea is crazy, and really spooky. Sort of like, some anonymous cowboy’s boots shed their skin on his dash. He is waiting for enough skins to cover the whole of the inside of the car. Scary huh?

The skins go along with his straw cowboy hat, and the toothpick in the corner of his mouth. When he speaks the picture fades, because there is no drawl, just pure Jersey Lawn-boy.

He says he bought his personal car with the earnings from the farm. Can’t be that much, because he owns a 1968 Ford Mustang. He calls it a classic. I call it rusted junk. It has potential to greatness, as we all do, but when it’s colors are red lace, and brown trim, and the brown trim refers to the shade around the lace holes, then the car is no longer a classic, but a doily junkyard reject.

He drove me to the Shop-rite in Wall once, and at any speed over twenty miles per hour, it sounded like a chorus of whistlers. “Strangers in the Night,” but it was daylight and no vocal, just the whistling part.

Maybe Frankie’s spirit is in the car, like that terrible NBC sit-com from 1966 with Gerry Van Dyke, the tag-along brother of Dick, My Mother the Car. Frankie was a Jersey boy, so who knows.

Anyway, tomorrow is Monday, and Lance mows the lawn for the last time this fall, at least till he comes back to bag the leaves, so I’ll have him climb in the bramble and see what he thinks.

I had a hard enough time dealing with that snake Shark-face in the Fatal Blow, and since my stroke, Fish, my internist says “take it easy, but take it.” LOL. No he just says, “take it easy,” so I do.

Till I sneak up on you next time, because I know a classy person like yourself wouldn’t be caught hanging around with an ole Mad Mutt like me, I say Shalom.

The always incredulous, but today, the not so Mad Mutt.

I’ve bumped Mutt away from the keyboard.

2009-09-10T20:32:00.008-04:00

Hello, this is Lew P and it was difficult but I got Mutt to go downstairs and get a Dagwood Sandwich and a Murphy’s for himself.

Tink and Pam took Jayson to the movies, one of those inane animation things. So the computer is mine for at least the time it takes for the Mad Mutt to gobble a 4-inch high deli sandwich. The BWC agent is out of the house.

I went with my wife to the Mystery Writers of America New York Chapter meeting last night at the National Arts Club. The guest speaker was Laura Lipmann who has written multiple New York Times best sellers starting in 1997. She has a resume that includes being a Journalist in Baltimore (home of Poe, and the late John Hughes both of whom aren’t under the bell curve), and therefore had experience with Druid Hill and the police so she’s been tainted as far as normalcy is concerned. I was very interested in hearing her speak because she writes from the dark side, and I have those tendencies myself.

She was very interesting, but more of that later.

As usual there was a cocktail party prior to the dinner and speaker. They had an exhibition of Pastels from the National Pastel Society, and they were incredible. Some looked like photographs rather than drawings. I wish I could write with the same level of talent. Practice, practice, practice – the rule of three’s.

I corralled a Brooklyn Ale and did the cheese and crackers thing. A lady who had recently published came up to me and introduced herself. I like friendly people, and I am very naïve.

I tried to talk craft because I am still learning. She volunteered her resume, and five reviews of her first novel, including a mild panning review from Publisher’s Weekly.

I asked her about her next project and she told me that her agent has nixed her Muslim in New York murder mystery. I wonder why? She’s determined to write it anyway.

Then she saw someone else who needed to know how she was doing, and she dumped me quickly. Her afterburners singed my eyebrows. I didn’t know a heavyset woman in her seventies could move that fast. But I’ve watched Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and seen a turbo-charged irate hippo run off, oh boy, flashbacks to my youth.

My wingman Arthur was there with me. He is going to run a satellite meeting of the MWA at Tumulty’s in October. If you live in central Jersey and want to hear Peggy Ehrhart and Mary Jane Clark speak, this is the place. The date is Oct 21. The cost will be posted, but my guess is $35 for a cocktail, dinner buffet and the entertainment. Tumulty’s is three blocks from the New Brunswick train station.

Peggy who is a board member of MWA was talking with Arthur and I horned in. She is a lovely lady who has a PhD in English. Why would she lowbrow-it to mystery writing? Oh yes, she also formed a blues band while a professor in college. She is the type of person who lives outside of categories. I like those type of people. I wish I were one of those.

If you want to know more about Peggy and her writing including her short stories http://peggyehrhart.com is the place to go.

During the time I listened to Peggy, another lady presented. She and I had spoken at the Cocktail Party for the Edgars, Delia Foley. She is writing a mystery, but is a neophyte as am I.

Her sister-in-law has just published her first suspense novel, In Their Blood. October 1^st, 2009 she will be launching the book at a party at Partners & Crime a bookstore at 44 Greenwich Avenue NYC. Champagne and hors D’oeuvres at 7 PM. (phone number 212-243-0440)

Partners & Crime’s web site: http://www.crimepays.com/.

I love hearing first time authors made it. It gives us undiscovered people hope, but I am very jealous of Sharon Potts, Delia’s sister-in-law, because she has a quote from Michael Connelly. He is one of my hero writers. I hope if you read the Fatal Blow that you can tell.

I also met a lady named Gail Stockton, who like myself has written a manuscript, but unlike me, she has an agent actively trying to sell it. I found a blog on which she writes, and read some of her work. http://www.womenofmystery.net/search/label/*Gail. I hope she succeeds, as her writing style is very accessible and fun to read. She puts her heart into it, and that is really important.

My Information Science professor, Dr. Ross Todd, will be so proud of me finding Gail’s site all on my own.

Manning the door at the dinner was Marco Conelli, who writes YA mysteries, with a sleuth who is a chess master and a genius, sort of a young Sherlock Holmes. Marco is a really nice person, soft-spoken and when I learned of his occupation I was surprised.

We spoke a little. He ate alone –because he manned the admissions desk through the meal – and I asked if his characters are loners too. He said ironically Matthew Livingston his detective is.

Write what you know, the Mad Mutt is a converted loner, because of Tink and Pam. Maybe Matthew will find someone who sees that it is worth it to get by the emotional barrier and meet the real guy behind it. It doesn’t have to take a Pixie to do it.

Marco’s books are Matthew Livingston and the Prison of Souls and Matthew Livingston and the Millionaire Murder. If you want to learn more about Marco who is a NYPD detective here is an interesting web site http://www.jacketflap.com/profile.asp?member=TeenSleuth.

Finally we come to Laura Lipmann who trisected the root cause – the motive – of murder mysteries to Money, Shame/Secrecy, and Obsession i.e. serial psychotic killers.

She then eliminated shame and secrecy as being valid motives of murder in today’s anything goes Internet world. She believes no one has shame or secrets that are worth killing to hide anymore. People’s lives are just out there and known.

She was raised a Baptist and if you have read any of her novels, she demonstrates this point well.

I applaud her from the shadows of the dark, as the author of three murders, two cardiac arrests and a stroke in my first novel. But the motive for two of the three in my novel is to prevent discovery of the killer in the first murder. Secrecy is a valid motive if you are protecting capital knowledge. The murders are like potato chips, after the first they just keep going down.

She states that while obsession is a valid motive for murder, she would categorize these serial killer books as thrillers rather than murder mysteries. I agree, because a thriller isn’t about who is doing the crime, but whether or not the protagonist can stop them.

This leaves money as the only motive for murder mysteries in the twenty-first century. Being from the school that says, money makes the world go round, but personally adding, whether we like it or not, I have to agree that money is a driving force in most murder mysteries.

The key point of the speech for me, however, related to hooking the reader early and continuously. Allowing your evil, dislikeable, naughty, whatever character to draw the reader’s attention, and never let it waver after that point.

I went home and for the thirtieth time re-wrote my first two pages. I want to thank Laura because I went back to a former beginning but blended in my newer writing. The preachy beginning to my novel is gone, and the in medias res beginning works.

I’ll open a bottle of the wine you were talking about Laura, if you’ll only send me the name. I was too busy writing down the gems to worry about what to drink.

Wait. Mutt just gave me a Murphy’s. I am honored and will get busy with that. Whoa, that frosty mug is cold. I’m pouring it right now. The bubbles come up funny in the Murphy’s. It’s really cool.

Thanks Mad ole boy. Finally someone can tell me I have a good-looking head, even if it is only on my beer. L’Chaim.

Yeah Mutt, you can have the keyboard back now. Pushy- pushy.

Lew P

Two Shore Holidays Pass – Sept.7th

2009-09-07T21:45:00.009-04:00

Two shore holidays passed within the last eight days, and all the full time residence of the Jersey shore (The Mainlanders for we live on the continent, not the islands next to it) celebrated in their way, barbeques, and pool parties, avoiding the beach for the last time this summer. It begins our new year whether we are Jewish, Catholic, Hindi or Atheist.

These special dates have meaning and religious significance that is unmeasured else where in New Jersey or maybe even the United States.

On Sunday August 31^st I cracked open two Murphy’s Stouts for me, and a California Chardonnay for Tink. She let me grill a Porterhouse to celebrate Return to Uni Day. The date when most of the college students, who have been partying every night – weekdays and weekends – at the shore, return to some institute of higher drinking, excuse me, I mean thinking. The loss of the walking polluted is to be celebrated with solemn silence, so we know they have really left.

As Pam was already with her Mom in New York, I never saw the other side of Return to Uni Day. The one where families suffer the anxiety of separation, if I had, I would have worried more about when they gather at the on campus fraternities, playing shot games and birthday drinking. I’ll rant about that another day.

Walking the boards at night will no longer involve the loud thump of the bass to signal the tribal message that temporary mating selections can be found here. Like we used to hear at the baseball games, “Get ya beeer heere.” The drums say to guys, “She’s in here, as near as a leer. So if you’re not queer, get in here.”

Since I’m not a girl, I can’t say what the bass means to them, but Tink doesn’t like the loud noise. At least that’s what she tells me. She is vocal about past experiences in the butcher shops at the shore, standing around as if she were Prime USDA choice and being ogled by guys with just enough brains to figure out the tab and a tip, with a pocket calculator. She became a professional wing girl. At least that’s what she tells me.

Shore bars filled to overflowing with girls wearing tank tops and minis. Hanging from their pierced umbilicus is scrollwork that could adorn the front door of the British Parliament. They have filigree on the crest of their buttocks that look like the logo for a Harley Davidson. The posture and demeanor says they’ll offer a test drive. The tank tops allow you to view the artwork coming and going.

The pitch and height of their shoes could give nosebleeds to a Sherpa guide. Like that 50’s song “Yak-kitty-Yak, thongs T-ed up their back.” This can’t be just the generation gap, it must be something more cosmic that rankles my sense of oy vey, or is it my feng shui? Remember when it was considered evil to give someone a wedgie? Now it’s girlish fashion.

The boards at Belmar across Ocean Ave. form a backrest for the drunk, high or romantic ones that actually attempt to talk first. They loll back and slur soft nothings or yell to their partner as if he or she is deaf or not paying attention or is across the Atlantic but requires their urgent communication. The scary part is they are less than a foot apart and they can’t see or hear each other, and one is going to climb in a car and drive them home or to a room.

You try not to listen, but most of the time you can’t help but hear. When you do, you wish you hadn’t. It’s fair, as the punishment fits the crime of eavesdropping. He wants to do what with which??? And you’re willing??? Sometimes even though I’m a doctor, the anatomic possibilities exceed my comprehension.

The ones who aren’t communicating via verbal signs, are using physical signals to get their message across. Lingual tonsil exams. Messages, oh my god, or are they massages. Kneading of secondary sexual organs, chest and buttocks, not to mention the ever popular, but not so subtle, groin rub; they should really get a room.

Someone who was lucky faster than them probably already occupies their room. Gives new meaning to the expression “the early bird catches the worm.” Boyo, that picture sort of skuzzes me out. Who knew Aesop wrote porno? Wouldn’t bet against the early bird catching an STD as well. Think about that Aesop.

Back to another gripe, they live in the rentals that sprawl over the several blocks from Main Street to Ocean Ave. Twelve to twenty people in a house built for a single family – father, mother, two children – if they are lucky a guest room too. Cars parked on the street from here to the Garden State Parkway. They hang in the streets and make car traffic difficult. You play miss-the-moving-drunk every weekend after 7 PM.

Tink gets on my case, because she went to Bar Anticipation <http://bar-a.com/>, and watched the NFL when she was 18 and 19, playing wing girl for her less pretty friends. Guys with nose hair that blended with their mustaches, or chest hair that needed a lawnmower leaned over her and asked, “Babe, you want a drink or something else. I can give you whatever you want.” Ew.

“Hey, Einstein, there are already three mugs of Bud in front of me, and a guy on each side.” She’d never say that because she is a lady. Her response was “Like sure, totally awesome dude.” Then she’d give the Bud to a girlfriend or buddy next to her. The guy got the message. She liked watching the Jets and Ken O’Brien; today she likes watching the Jets and Mark Sanchez. I’m still explaining how four downs works, so I don’t think she’s a rabid fan.

She didn’t have time for boyfriends then. She was going to school and working at the same time. X-ray tech school is difficult, lots of math and science. It needs focus and Tink focuses well. She did the same thing when she worked for me, while going to computer school at DeVry. She writes programs now, and sometimes researches on the invisible web for me, when mysteries require information the average person can’t find.

She believes in the Star Track credo “To go where no one has gone before” in a virtual – hacking – sense.

She is a good resource for a detective.

Good reason to lock her up to a long-term contract with that diamond ring. Saves a lot on salary too. Cynics that we both are.

To answer any questions about Tink’s past, she does have five earrings in her right ear, but no tats and no other piercings. At least that I have found yet, and I think I’ve done a thorough inspection.

One eye is blue-green and the other is green-blue, but she was born that way. It is not contact lenses, a fashion or cultural statement. Although one boy friend was a very bad choice, reference The Fatal Blow, she hasn’t had anyone burn her out of her home lately.

That’s fine since she lives with me, and I have nowhere else to go. I’d have to live with Lew P but he says his wife wouldn’t deal well with another couple living in their house. She can barely live with that couple occupying Lew P’s head.

Tink laughs when I get on my, “that’s not the way things were when I was that age” rant, as we walk the boards on a Saturday night after a meal out, at Brindl http://www.brandlrestaurant.com / or maybe Vivas http://www.vivaslatincuisine.com/ or Ragin’ Cagin’ http://ragincajunnj.com/ . She reminds me that the hitching posts were meter free back then. And you had to clean up after your vehicle. In my youth every father had and knew how to use a shotgun so his family could eat. They didn’t have food stores only tents and hunting, following the herds of Buffalo – in New Jersey?

She claims the whole era had a less boisterous life-style, no television or radio, only books read by the light of candles. That type of talk makes my joints creak. The whippersnapper should respect her elder. She and Pam keep reminding me that I am her elder, much elder, but when we’re alone at home she forgets my age, and so do I. You’re as young as you feel. I’m 37 by that standard.

Speaking about age, I admit that when you’re three years older than your college classmates and been to war and back, studying on the GI plan, that being a frat boy has lost its luster. Something in my stomach churns like the generator in a turbine when confronted by someone pissing away time and opportunity.

Getting fall-down drunk and pissing in the gutter seems less romantic after picking up human body parts in the street outside of an American Bar in Saigon. The aftermath of anti-personnel devices strapped to a busboy that wanted to be a hero for his nation, blowing up his countrymen with us.

The MPI work in Southeast Asia involved protecting our boys and finding out who wished to harm them, but it also involved harvesting the crops of guerilla warfare. Every time some drunken bastard plays dodge the traffic in Belmar, I think of that humid night of broken bodies, bloody gutters and the smell of burnt sulfur, and skin. If I drove a hummer under a wailing siren, the nightmare would be complete.

The second holiday is Labor Day, and it signals the exit of the summer renters, the islanders go home. All the New Yorkers come from islands – Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Long, even Staten – so they are the islanders.

When the islanders leave, then the beaches are empty and the pace is slower and walking the boards is not an Olympic slalom event. Even the waves and the ocean seem to relax, with fewer rip tides. The people walking the shore say hello to each other, because we know the other can’t be a foreigner.

The line at Hoffman’s < http://www.hoffmansicecream.net/> becomes shorter although with the lowered heat, the urge to break my diet becomes less. Maybe not the urge, but the excuse I can give the BWC agent is weaker. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, and it is the best ice cream on the Jersey shore, at least in my opinion.

So Labor Day will pass, and getting a reservation on the weekend for a restaurant of average quality will not be an effort in Mission Impossible.

I will finally be able to take Jayson to Surf Taco and not worry that his activities will aggravate the Dude at the next table who’s trying to talk a teeny-bopper into hero worship with his prowess at hangin’ ten. The closest any Dude from Jersey has come to surfin’ is when they get on the web late at night. And then they aren’t looking for that big wave. Hangin’ ten is a measurement of their delusion.

Jersey isn’t for water surfin’. It’s for sun bathin’ chicks with bikinis eyeing that tattooed buck while he dashes between blankets playing Frisbee kicking sand everywhere. When people complain, he says, “Fugetta-bout-it. Catchin’ mah Fris-bee.” Then he adjusts himself and with a shrug flings the plastic plate back to his friend.

The skateboardin’ Dude with their pants down far enough to see half his boxer’s, making him waddle rather than walk. He slides down the black metal railing of concrete public stairs, landing with a crash at the feet of a gray panther lady whose walker stops his forward roll. Then laughing, he pulls his pants up to half-mast and waddles off, limping with his board under his arm, his right knee bleeding.

I saw some dumb ass trying to wind surf from a boat at Spring Lake Heights this summer. Might as well try that over Secaucus for all the fun it is at the Jersey shore. What’s the view, the Long Branch train line, the 7-11 in Belmar, or maybe the scenic Tire Farms of Farmingdale, like this is the Mexican Riviera?

No this is Jersey “fougettaboutit.” We eat meat and we drink beer, NJPAC my ass. We’re the culture of landfill and toxic dumps, but we’re happy, so leave us alone.

All you cultured islanders go home and let us enjoy the quiet of the ocean as it rolls in with high tide and wipes the beaches clean. Let us sail our boats out of the inlets of the Raritan and the other bays along the coastal water way. We like our fish caught fresh and delivered to our plate hours after it left the sea. We like to go and watch our children play traveling sports like soccer, softball, basketball, baseball and football. We like our pleasure simple, and without fancy polishes that don’t let you see through to what is actually underneath.

We like to be honest. So fougettaboutit, and go home to your islands.

Lastly I want to comment on the small brew contest held at Monmouth Race track on Sept 6^th. It follows in the long line of local contest and festivals, the Belmar Seafood festival, the Jazz festival in Long Branch, and all those other festivals that smell of fried grease and stale drafts.

They represent all that is bad about the Jersey shore before Labor Day. 2,000, 3,000, 10,000 people stuffed in a space meant for half that many. Food, beverage, and the music are always generic, like eating the cardboard burgers at McDonalds. When is the last time a culinary contest that mattered was held within fifty miles of the Jersey shore, exclude A.C. and the set of results is void.

Let’s be honest with ourselves, it’s just an excuse to pack in people and sell cheap food before the islanders go home. Food that real New Jersey people won’t touch with a ten-foot kielbasa. Yes, the trouble with New Jersey from Memorial Day to Labor Day is the foreigners and our catering to them, trying to support ourselves through the winter on the profits of the summer, that we garnered from the sophisticated rubes that populate the shore on week long rentals. We need immigration rules like Mexico has and then our shore would be safe.

I have never been to the beer festival, because I don’t think I want to drive out of a parking lot with 5,000 inebriated drivers. It’s bad enough driving against the purple-gray haired ladies in the parking lot at Shop-rite. Driving in New Jersey is a competition as surely as NASCAR is. They drive as if god hadn’t invented lanes or yellow lines or turn signals. Maybe it’s the gray panthers that are defending our shores for us.

And you can take all those micro-brews and throw them in the trash. I’ll pay extra for a cool Murphy’s Stout, and a totally secluded back yard that is quiet, a pool to sit around, and Tink in a bikini, better yet a mono-kini serving the Murphy’s with that impish smile.

Today I sign the Mad, but not insane, Mutt.

Supra-Tachy a Special End to an Evening → the Mad Mutt.

2009-09-04T10:00:00.003-04:00

I feel obligated to give you follow up on the end of the evening at Asbury Park, two nights ago. No the title is not a typo, so just be patient. I know I can misspell with the best of them and thank god for spell check, but this time, I’m right and everyone who corrects me is wrong. As my favorite Pixie would say, “Absolutely Totally Awesome for me.”

We, Elsa Neinstine, Tink, Dr. Heart-throb and I finished our cakes and coffee at the Baker Boys <http://www.thebakerboys.us/> without the presence of the interloper, whose name shall be Atlantic City Maestro. It was pleasant, and we decided to walk back on the boardwalk together as our cars were parked in the municipal parking. They had space # 117. No charge after 9 PM, what a bargain.

The boardwalk makes you remember the days when Asbury Park was a resort for New Yorkers and evenings strolling the boards meant families and friends playing at games of skiball, miniature golf and jumping on rides. Tim Mcloone’s Supper Club <http://www.timmcloonessupperclub.com/> was still busy with people spilling out onto the boardwalk, and music playing. It must have a great view of the Ocean. I’m not sure what the difference is between it and Mcloone’s Salt Water Café < http://www.saltwaterbeachcafenj.com/>, but that’s Mcloone’s problem not mine. Maybe one is downstairs and one is upstairs, since they are both listed at 1200 Ocean Ave.

Tink says the buzz is good, but the food is average.

We were still walking on the boards when Dr. Heart-throb’s beeper alarmed. It’s 12:30 AM. 4 hours since we ordered at Baker Boys and 3 ¼ hours since we sent Atlantic City Maestro on his way. Dr. Heart-throb announced he has a patient in the ER at Jersey Shore with a supraventricular tachycardia that won’t break. He is developing Angina, and at risk for a heart attack.

Translation à The patient’s heart is going too fast (140 – 180 beats per minute) because the usual trigger for a beat has been superseded by a faster trigger in the top half of the heart. His heart is out of control, and going to crash, like a virus plagued PC.

Dr. Heart-throb had to go in and start drugs with the possibility of inserting a pacemaker tonight, and other acute treatments before the patient has permanent damage to the muscle wall of the heart. Other than death, that is what makes a heart attack bad for the patient in the long run. It weakens and damages the heart muscle called myocardium.

Tink and I agreed to drive Elsa home. Dr. Heart-throb left but not before introducing himself by his full name. Dr. Ertan Hart. Tink gave me a pixified smile, saying wouldn’t you know with her eyes, but you never would. I had to look off into the ocean to avoid laughing in his face and being rude. People who live in the Mad Mutt’s shoes, shouldn’t throw moans, but Tink’s look didn’t help. He really is a nice man, who could be the title of a Johnny Cash song, A Boy named Ertan.

He should have become a Urologist, then his mother might have name him Richard. How confusing is the name, Dr. Dick Hyman OB-GU? Oh but I digress.

I’ve known many doctors with similar messy monikers, which I call truth in labeling. Dr. Mark Colon gastroenterologist. Dr. Lawrence Bone orthopedic surgeon. Dr. Waterhouse nephrologist. Dr Brain, psychiatrist. There are many others, but tonight, and with what had happened earlier, this was the perfect end to the evening. We reserved the right to laugh when Tink and I were home in the shore house. Bubs wouldn’t be embarrassed. But the night wasn’t over.

Elsa told us on the way to her house, she introduces him as her boyfriend, Art, because of his full name. She says his mother was a fan of country western music and they always sing about that stuff, so she branded him.

It wasn’t until I took Jayson to Elsa for his preschool pre-school physical that I learn the completion of the story, which only got better.

The patient with the supraventricular tachycardia was A.C. Maestro. His girlfriend drove him to the hospital. Apparently she lives in Neptune and he was biding his time on the boardwalk while she got off work. When she got home, they got busy.

Extra-marital sex gets the heart going, as per a certain Ertan Hart M.D.

Dr. Hart could not break the rate in the Emergency Room and with all the drugs A. C. Maestro demanded and received in the ER for comfort prior to Dr. Hart’s treatments, he could not legally sign his consent for insertion of a pacemaker. This is a problem I have tackled. {see The Fatal Blow. Lew P. has written about what happened when my patient had this problem.}

So unknown to Maestro, they called his wife who presented at the ER bedside while Maestro and bimmy were lovingly holding hands. Elsa said this was the PG version since Jay was in the room, so who knows what was really being held. His red-haired wife went infrared, and launched the flight of the blonde bimmy. Did NASA deny UFO sitings that night on the Jersey shore?

Red chased Blondie around the ER until Dr. Hart called security and had the mistress removed. She had no legal standing to be there. The wife did.

The chase scene and its tension broke Maestro’s tachy-arrhythmia, and here tacky is being used and spelled appropriately once again, a new world’s record for Mutt. The scene was super-tacky and as Tramp sang in yesteryear, Super Freak-y.

Maestro will get a pacemaker inserted electively, and he actually produced insurance cards when he was told he was clinic ineligible by the social worker.

The hospital and Dr. Hart are now able to go after him for the payment of services recently rendered. If he has to pay out of pocket, it might hurt more than it did in the past, since his net worth looks to be decreasing by at least, fifty percent.

He may have to recuperate in Neptune. Although his wife said, “On Uranus. That’s where I’m throwin’ ya, out on Uranus.” As everyone already knows, if he wears a Johnny coat home his moon will shine all over Neptune.

When Dr. Hart first addressed him in the ER, he spoke about suing me for terroristic threats. Remember I had asked if he was packin’? Of course, I have three witnesses that will say that never happened.

By the time he’ll be discharged his lawyers and accountants will be working full-time auditing assets and hidden reserves, trust funds in Grand Cayman. They will get to play with his wife’s lawyers and the IRS for the near and foreseeable future.

Yes, that was how he qualified for the clinic. Did you know that you can’t claim to be the executor of an off-shore trust fund for your underage dog, Fido? Even if he is dependent on you, he is not your dependent for tax purposes. This includes the situation where he is a full time student in obedience school. You still can’t claim him. You can’t divert your salary. You still owe taxes, even if the money is in the dog’s name, and dogs don’t file tax returns. Are you listening Jerry Koosman?

Of course, the disclaimer for the preceding statement excludes politicians as they can claim any deduction and tax shelter that they want, if they have been in office long enough.

Ain’t life grand.

à Dr. Madison Muttnick

04Sept09 Mutt on the line

2009-09-02T21:25:00.014-04:00

Tink and I were out to dinner Wednesday at the Lagosta Lounge in the rebuilt Asbury Park. We parked the car in a white lined space # 62 in the municipal lot across the street, and walked fifty-five feet to the front door. A longer walk would be scary, even for a retired MPI from Nam.

The streets are clean but the area reeks of musty buildings waiting for renovation, like the Casino down the boardwalk. Your mind tells you, moments ago broken glass bottles, loose trash, and old newspapers grew on this ground. It was a trash farm, gentrified with condo-builder's money, meant to entice people there, like bait for a Marlin.

The stench is gone, but the air is too clean, no odor at all. You can’t even smell cooking food. It feels as if one of those old street sweepers with the water spray and the front-end rotating bristle-brushes has pushed by, removed all human trace evidence, and the heat of the day has sterilized the dry street.

The same feeling one gets walking through the park outside Rats, the restaurant in South Jersey. As if the Metropolitan Museum of Art was constructed on unprocessed landfill. Artificial goodness created for your enjoyment, but masking the raw nature that is underneath or in the past. All plastic, artificial, a cigarette lighter could make it look like a napalmed forest. I don’t like to think back to those days, especially when Tink is on my arm. Like Disney World, but Walt admits his world is fake, at Rats ... Wind in the Hollow my ass.

Asbury Park, post-napalm New Jersey.

We had a reservation so it only took them a half hour to seat us at a table by a low wall that separated it from the bar. When I made a face, the host told me it was an hour for the next table.

Tink drew young hitters like moths to a flame. Each one thought that they could run off her father and come away with a prize. They leaned over the wall with Apricot Mojitos whispering words.

Tink has fun showing her ring and talking loudly about how I shot one of Zambone’s men and Dar stabbed another. The hitters usually turn white and slink back over the wall, like a home run hit over the fence.

Do real men drink Mojitos? They did have Young’s special double chocolate Stout. If you get the chance, exchange your Mojitos for it. You’ll be better off.

Dinner was delicious, but not better than five or six other places on the shore, where you can talk and be heard during dinner. When did food start taking precedent over the company and conversation? Tink knows the buzz and had to see what it was about. I humor her.

The idea that this is a romantic place to take a date is similar to the concept that a meat locker is spacious and a butcher shop delicate or a Stones Concert is a place to propose marriage, while Mick’s askin’ “do you want to see my pants fall down?”

I am not into the bar scene, and since Tink started working in my office, she isn’t either. Now she has my ring, so ….

We came, we saw and we left deaf but sated.

As we were having cappuccinos at the Baker Boy’s in the Grand Arcade at Convention Hall, Dr. Elsa Neinstine walked by with a boyfriend. Since Myron left for college, the pediatrician has dropped weight. I know how hard that can be. With the new figure, apparently, came a boyfriend. He’s a cardiologist on staff at Jersey Shore hospital. He’s a heart-throb – sorry about that. As a victim of a cardiac arrest, I should know better than to tease that organ.

Neither of them will be diagnosed with anorexia in the near future, but Elsa’s changed figure demanded a compliment, because of the effort she must have made. Losing weight is not only a physical effort. It is a psychological commitment. She has obviously made both with significant results.

She thanked me and noticed Tink’s work as my in-house BWC (Board of Weight Control) agent. I’m down to a 32-inch waist from a 40. Promenading Bubs on the boards at Spring Lake and Lake Como/Belmar along with morning sit-ups have had their effect on my waistline. It’s taken two years, but I am fifteen pounds over the weight that I was in Nam. There aren’t too many overweight Military Police Investigators – Marines in particular.

They dropped in for dessert, and we enlarged our table to four. The people strolling by were the entertainment. However, between my old practice and her present one, not to mention his practice at Jersey Shore Hospital, the parade of people quite frequently stopped, gaped at us, and smiled with recognition.

Do the people view the animals at the zoo, or are the animals viewing the people that come to visit? Where is Descartes when you need him?

Several times people came over and introduced themselves as if we were rock stars and they wanted our autograph. I guess physicians still have a special place in some people’s hearts.

One of the interlopers interjected himself into our conversation, pulling up a chair and sitting down. He was about to order, when Elsa asked, “Since you’ll finish last, you pay the check.”

He obviously wasn’t the parent of one of her patients. He gave her boyfriend a look and said, “With what he charges for simple procedures like a cath, he can afford to pay for me.”

I stood up and suggested that he wasn’t welcome at our table. He looked at me and said, “Who are you anyway?”

“Dr. Madison Muttnick, ret. MPI - U.S. Navy, and former accused murderer of two hospital administrators. Are you packin’? My Colts nearby.”

He blushed jumped up and walked off without another word.

I asked Elsa’s boyfriend, “Guess you lost a patient?”

“No. Can’t get rid of that one. He is in collection and when he presents to the ER with angina, they always call me. Usually it’s after midnight because he hits the bars. Adultery is documented as the most stressful sex. I come in because it is life or death.

He never follows up in the office, because he won’t pay.”

“Maybe he can’t?” Tink asked. “I mean treating pro bono is a physician’s obligation to the community. A payback? Mutt gave back twenty percent with clinics and such.”

“It is and I do. But know what he does for a living?”

There was silence although Elsa flashed an impish smile, as she knew the answer, but wasn’t raining on her boyfriend’s parade.

“He’s the CEO of one of the hotels in Atlantic City. $2 million a year with bonus. He claims no insurance and rides the system free. Hope he doesn’t come back.”

We went on to talk about more congenial subjects.

Myron, Elsa’s son is paralyzed from the waist down. How's that congenial?

He is a sophomore in an elite program at a College in New York. The really great part is that all the buildings are wheelchair accessible. Subterranean tunnels through out the campus allow Myron to get to any class no matter what the weather. It is truly an optimal situation. The pre-law history major has made Dean’s List every semester so far. That's congenial.

If Pam’s caseload keeps growing at this rate, she might need an intern over next summer. She could do worse, since Myron rivals Tink for researching on the Internet, and Tink is the best. I told Elsa I would put in a word with my daughter tomorrow. She has Janet as her secretary and whatever else, but who knows what next summer will bring.

Baker Boys’ Red Velvet Cupcakes … you only live once.

à the Mad Mutt.

31th Aug 09 → The Sunday Cock ‘n’ Bull session

2009-08-31T10:30:00.014-04:00

My day to write on the blog. I’m sitting at a table behind the front window of Starbuck’s monitoring the parking lot. I’m waiting for my friend Madison, the Mad Mutt, to arrive. We’ve a lot in common, as we are both orthopedic surgeons who aren’t practicing surgery anymore.

He calls these brunches cock ‘n’ bull sessions as in “we’ll have a little of the cock ‘n’ bull, and a venti.” Most of the time, we venti plenty, two old bone-bending curmudgeons who think they understand how the world works, even, as the ground shifts under our feet.

I guess, a former Marine Police Investigator isn’t going to call our meetings a hen party, but that is basically what they are. When we aren’t venting, we gossip, but with a manly attitude. No Latté’s, we go for Cappuccino’s no added sugar, and chocolate croissants warmed in the microwave. Crumb cake gets powdered sugar on your Tommy Bahamas shirts, or your front-pleated chinos, never know when you’ll need a little extra tummy room. They have to be dry-cleaned, not a good idea to soil them. The BWC agents at home call the white powder trace evidence.

We be men. Picture both of us flexing our Pecs while growling, ”Grrr.” The belly bounces, when old guys flex their pecs. Doesn’t happen when you are young and fit. Women straight from the gym in Reeboks, leggings and sports bras stare, wonder, and then move away. The baristas giggle. They think were flirting. To us flirting has one monogamous target, our in-house BWC agent. It works for me.

We talk about the kids. He has one, a female lawyer, Pam who is divorced and practicing law in Shrewsbury. That’s New Jersey for all of you who are geographically challenged.

I have two daughters neither of whom has taken the first step toward divorce, since they are both single, and never married. But they’re young and there’s time, hopefully for marriage without divorce. Marriage is sort of like playing golf, the fewer tries the better your score. Mulligans are frowned upon and costly.

Mutt is divorced and making a second attempt with fiancée Tink. It’ll work this time, since they’ve known each other for over eight years. She started out as his x-ray tech. For the last four or five years, she has lived in his shore home as a dollar-a-month tenant, because her crazy former boyfriend arsoned her Metuchen house to the ground. They slept in separate bedrooms until two years ago when The Fatal Blow happened. But now, even Pam accepts they are good for each other, making a family with her and Jayson. And that leads us to today.

Anyway, I watched a 735 BMW drive up with Pam behind the wheel. Tink was in the back seat with Jayson, playing a silly car game that had Jay throwing himself. Mutt gave Pam a real kiss, and got out. It was good to see the love. It wasn’t always that way, since Pam’s return to the shore. Misunderstanding fostered by ten years of non-communication, but that’s over.

Tink then exited the back door, and she and Mutt rehearsed a kissing scene from “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” Bradjolina had nothing over my two friends. Get a room.

He was only getting coffee for god’s sake, and Starbuck’s has never been fatal. The man's been through Vietnam as an MPI and has survived gunshot wounds from the Mob. He's only going to drink coffee til you guys get back.

Tink got in the front seat, and they drove off, while Pam and Tink chatted away as if they were having the cock ‘n’ bull while Mutt was going to a serious commitment like rehab.

It’s a sunny Sunday and I figured Great Adventure. Mutt corrected me. “Right direction, wrong target, the Outlets.”
Jayson had begged to sit at Starbuck’s with us, but the rules for cock ‘n’ bull are no one under 18 allowed even with a grandparent. So he gets to play model for Tink and Pam.

Accessorizing, the female term for putting frilly things a young man against his will to humiliate him. Jay, so young yet so wise, saw what was coming. He was powerless to stop it.

Mutt thanked me for the saving him by creating a valid excuse to escape. He’d pay the bills and not participate in the shopping effort. Men are more into try-outs than try-ons.

I suggested we needed to take Jay to a ball game and teach him macho things. Mutt’s answer was “They can’t even walk in and out of the dugout without hurting themselves. They get hurt during rehab for heaven’s sake. They’re not men, they’re an infirmary waiting to happen, hospital ward fodder in a uniform.”

Mutt is a fan of the Mets as I am. We have the insight of Board Certified Orthopedic Surgeons. Hell, in the past, I even met and spoke with some of the ones taking care of the Mets. The injuries this year create one of several conclusions.

One, the people talking to the media are lyin’ rats. When they say it is a small injury involving the ankle, it is probably broken in three places, and dislocated. For what purpose? Got me. With the way sports teams in the Metropolitan area reveal injuries, this could be the true problem for fans. Delusional expectations feed by false information. OR …

Two, the doctors don’t know what they are doing or are influenced by the team management to take a shot at a quick fix. Anyone who knows anything about histology and hematology knows that injecting damaged blood products into a healing area increases inflammation by adding fibrous precursors, causing more scarring. This prolongs healing, and makes it more painful, period. The scar needs to be stretched everyday for up to nine months. It is the immutable law of nature’s healing. It is not suspended because this player is a New York Mutt. Now they say Jose may need surgery. What are they doing? That’s rhetorical.
I think the timing on the Delgado surgery speaks for itself. A-Rod had similar surgery, and he’s back fighting for a pennant. The Mutts {Mets new name} – with all due respect to my physician colleague – timed it so they could pay a salary for a player who will miss at least 80% of the season and will become a free agent this winter. And thanks to Bernie M. there isn’t enough money left to re-sign him.

Anyone out there want to get paid millions while rehabbing in Florida and occasionally sitting on the bench of a major league team, joking around with your teammates. You could do worse. Then when things get really stressful, you could take time off and visit your family and newborn daughter in the Caribbean. Is that a sympathetic tear I see in your eye? Is it for Mutt and me or the injured players who are suffering so?

Then next year that player can negotiate a contract that will make a team pay him a million or two just to peek and see if he regained any of his past prowess. He makes money whether he has recovered fully or not.

Mutt ranted about how even the New York Nomads were having a better year, and four of them were indicted for throwing baseball games. You can read about that in the future, when he has finished writing that book. It doesn't have a title yet. It may not even be a complete outline, but it's there in his head, waiting.

Arthur Frank, our friend from the FBI, is a Phillies fan. Boyo, we can’t invite him to the cock ‘n’ bull sessions until it’s NFL time. His winter team is the Eagles. Then we can talk about hiring a felon for the backfield. Maybe Art worked on his clearance?

“Who let the dogs out?” Oh my bad. I don’t think they will play that song in Philly this year.

At least, we have ammo for the cock ‘n’ bulls this winter, when Art hangs with us, or takes Mutt to the range in Sea Girt for target practice.

Till then we’ll just have to stand the pain.

Lew P.

Mutt’s Journal 28th Aug 09

2009-08-29T09:58:00.005-04:00

Friday morning office hours: Four second opinions for surgery and three independent medical examinations, two sent by AllState. One was a walking wounded, with a large herniated disc at L4-5 on the MRI associated with a missing knee jerk reflex and a sensory deficit on the anterior shin. AllState won’t be happy with the report, but that isn’t important.

The other examinee is healed but claiming persistent symptoms, a fraud without findings, awaiting the green poultice. I asked for several tests that will be accepted by the legal system as hard evidence of normalcy. Justice will be done, if AllState authorizes the test. When they fake continued injuries, they are reaching into the public’s pocket.

The last client was the centerfielder of the New York Nomads. He was having issues with balance, swallowing, walking and driving at night, no wonder they can’t beat the Sisters of Mercy’s girls softball team.

He already had a big work-up at a New York hospital, but the blood work and x-rays were normal. At 19 million a year, the team wanted him on the field, not in the infirmary. The doctors dismissed him as a drunk and the DUI stop in Florida during spring training, served as evidence, even though he registered zero on the BAC machine.

When doctors don’t know the answer, the patient is crazy or lying, or the objective test performed by a machine is wrong, because a doctor never is.

As a doctor, I know we generally believe this lie, to protect our egos. All physicians suffer from the same delusion, DOE, Doctor of Everything. That’s why so many go bankrupt running a restaurant or something. It comes with the hypocrite’s oath. Sorry I digress.

Josh Jones was accused of throwing Major League games. My daughter, Pam, is defending him, because George – her ex – is his business agent and sent the referral.

Josh may not reach the hall of fame in Cooperstown, but after twenty minutes examining him, I know he’ll make the hall of fame of arrogant asses. We consulted anyway, because we are professionals, and he’s sick, physically.

Tink said his aura is sickening, but that should be differentiated from physical disease. The difference between smelling rotten eggs and eating them is the degree of involvement. Doctors smell the cooking, friends of Josh, well you get the picture.

I’m convinced he isn’t bright enough to figure out how to throw a game. He’s lucky to remember how to throw a baseball, or find his way to the ballpark in time for the game, while riding in a limousine with the driver using a GPS.

His disease interfered with his ability this year, but next year he’ll bounce back. I know what ails him. I can get him the cure. I’m a doctor; I know it all.

With the humor of the supernatural, dark thunderhead clouds filled the sky at the end of office hours. Tink laughed, because I had promised Jayson an afternoon at Point Pleasant on the rides. Apparently I didn’t know the weather report. Omniscient for less than a day, so goes life.

The Monmouth sky is deep enough to hold thick black clouds that cause sudden street floods and thunder that rattle Anderson Windows, both panes like Spanish maracas.

Pam had client appointments all afternoon at her Shrewsbury office, and release Jay to our custody. It takes two adults to control a single hopped up eight year-old on a mission of exuberance. He had day-cared all morning. He is getting used to calling Tink, Bubby although she isn’t much older than his mother. I am getting used to calling her snookems, in public, which drives the young guys who want to hit on her absolutely crazy. Yeah, I said absolutely. Her vocabulary is rubbing off on me too.

We reached Jenkinson’s and bought a strip of tickets, as Jayson eyed the rides. I asked him about visiting the Aquarium.

“Grandappy, I like dogs like Bubs, not fish. Fish are yucky. You can’t pet ‘em.”

So we went to the rides. Tink rode the tilt-a-whirl with Jay because I get carsick and have flashbacks to helicopters in Nam. I’m too large to get in the small train with him, so we watched him circle the yard. He begged to go to the water slide, but we all wore Bermudas and t-shirts.

“Next time big guy.” I winked at him and he winked back.

It started to rain. We still had 8 tickets, but I used all 8 to buy a kiss from Tink – the bargain of the day – and she stowed them in her carryall.

Jay asked, “We come back tomorrow?”

We ate at Jenkinson’s Pavillion. The rain didn’t stop, so we drove home to the shore house to wait for Pam. Jay laid out in front of the television and couldn’t care less that nothing in the house was moving except Bubs. She only wagged her tail sitting at the foot of the couch while I read the JBJS. Tink napped.

Dinner tonight at Punjab Ocean Palace owned by my Friend Singh Mack, Chicken Vindaloo. Jayson brought his six-shooter, because he’s sure not all Indians are friendly like Uncle Mack. Too bad I don’t have FBI protection anymore.

The Mad Mutt goodnight.

Mutt's Journal

2009-08-28T22:15:00.007-04:00

I now have a co-author who will be writing about his world. His name is Dr. Madison Muttnick. He is the main character in a series of mystery novels, some of which are actually already in manuscript form. He visits me daily at my home and tells me about his world.

He is an Orthopedic Surgeon who is semi-retired after his stroke. He still performs second opinions and Independent Medical Examinations in his brand new office at the hospital annex. It represents part of the settlement which was made at the end of The Fatal Blow.

His x-ray tech, Tinker Belle, Rose Mary Angelucci, is now his fiancee, but she still works with him. His daughter Pam is a lawyer with offices in Shrewsbury. His grandson Jayson lives at the shore house with Tink and Pam, and a white standard Poodle that Pam still calls Bubbles, but everyone else calls, Bubs.

The Mad Mutt will be blogging on this site with daily activities at the shore. He is presently working on the diagnosis of Josh Jones who is the multi-million dollar center fielder for the New York Nomads.

All characters mentioned in his journal are purely fictitious. Any resemblance to people, alive or dead is purely coincidental. Reference to world events and actual places that exist are made to ground the scenes in reality. Not all the places actually exist, and not all the events actually took place, except in the Mad Mutt's mind. Which according to Sartre would make them real to Mutt. Go figure.

If this world as described by the Mad Mutt seems real to you, then I thank you for believing. If it seems preposterous, then I am sorry. It is written to entertain and to have fun. The real world with its problems and its solutions is at times too real. Mutt always escapes successfully, and it is my pleasure to bring you along.

The Mad Mutt and Tink were in the office Friday morning and spent the afternoon with Jayson at Pt. Pleasant. For full details check tomorrow's post.

Dr. Lew

Birth Announcement: Dr. Madison Muttnick 90,000 words, 47 chapters and 356 double-spaced pages long, the Fatal Blow.

2009-06-17T12:41:00.015-04:00

Dr. Madison Muttnick was conceived in the basement of a bar in New Brunswick, among the sterno-heated aluminum chaffing dishes filled with chicken marsala and a fleshy white fish whose exact identity remains unknown. It’s not as sleazy as it sounds. In September 2008, Tumulty’s was the site of the New Jersey Satellite meeting of Mystery Writers of America. My friend Arthur had been urging me to write murder mysteries, as Darth Varder to my Luke. I had refused to come over to the dark side until that date.

The guest panel that night included Mary Jane Clark, Jane Cleland, and Jeff Cohen. Chris Grabenstein moderated the meeting. The writing of a murder mystery with three or four tent poles as landmarks, clarified the anatomy of the mysterious literary birth canal. They set the path for the Mad Mutt to spring forth without Caesarian sectioning of my brain. Arthur and the above listed group must therefore be considered Aunts and Uncles of the good Doctor.

In the past, 1985 and again in the 1990’s I started a murder mystery, and each time I aborted it for lack of enthusiasm. I wasn’t ready for parenthood. In 2009 I am the proud father of a novel. Want to see snapshots? Three murders, one wounding via gunshot, an attempted poisoning, and a heart attack with a stroke as the residual, there are also multiple acts of deception. My little one is so precocious.

My mind’s fertile womb nurtured the seed into a 90,000 word murder mystery in which the protagonist, Dr. Madison Muttnick is a middle-aged orthopedic surgeon with an inflated sense of righteousness. He learns that being right can get you killed. The cliché is write what you know, so you have a platform and expertise. I am a retired orthopedic surgeon who discontinued practicing rather than practice medicine that saw the patient as an inconvenience on the way to a bill.

The Fatal Blow is not an only child. Prior to its birth, I created an 115,000 word mainstream novel called Aphrodite and the Frog King. First time parenthood teaches the sire and the author significantly. Re-writing and editing a 600,000 word novel down to 115,000 is a whole MFA program by itself. A literary PhD equivalent is gained through re-writing and editing the synopsis and the chapter outline. The child matures to adulthood through experiences.

A&tFK had no platform and therefore was lost in the crowd, unseen, failing to grow to its full stature. It is confined to my laptop on just rom space and electricity, the computer equivalent of bread and water. It continues to grow in my mind, but stagnates in its development in binary digital flesh.

The Fatal Blow will not remain as the only Muttnick mystery for long. Another embryo grows in the womb. As Mutt recovers from his stroke, he will become involved in another mystery, involving one of his daughter’s clients who is accused of murdering her husband, an abortion practicing Ob-Gyn. Meanwhile, Tink, Mutt's young girlfriend, becomes accidently pregnant with Mutt's child.

So my family of writings will contain one mainstream novel, one murder mystery and a murder mystery on the way. I didn’t even need an ultrasound to deter the new little one’s genre.

Oh and PS as in publish or sink, we will be having a birthday party of sorts for Dr. Madison Muttnick, although the partyers will not know it. Arthur is planning another Satellite meeting of the New York Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America for October 21, 2009. If you wish further information or to be informed of the plan, contact the New York Chapter of Mystery Writers of America, or leave a message on this blog.