Franklin Crawford

After a few years of brilliance, intellectual iconoclast Christopher Hitchens is at a loss for words. He announced his own death in the Sept. 2010 issue of Vanity Fair and boy was it ... boring. 

Some will say he got lucky. The cancer got him before the booze really showed itself. But the booze already had its way with Christopher Hitchens, former voice of the Left who trumped P.J. O'Rourke's hard right in the 80s, with his own abrupt reactionary shift during the Clinton era.

Well. Bill Clinton lost more sleep over pussy than he ever did fretting about the thoughts of a party ingrate.And what did O'Rourke and Co. give us with their economic conservatism and their whacked libertarian ideals: George Bush I&II.

Hitchens'seses move ought to have steeled the wits of his new found foes back then, but he knew his enemy had no teeth: The Lefties, The Liberals, The Progressives. He chewed them up as they ate Brie, cabaled, fucked each others wives, complained about traitors and  demonized him. Almost the same way so many Lefties made fun of Dubya and his stupid talk. Turns out Hitchens may have been their only wit. Pity. He's not the lion that roared across anybody's stage, really. Animals, when they are dying, shut up and hide in the bush or under a porch. 

Hitchens is doing for cancer what he did to politics for the Lefties: Turned Mencken's greatest show on earth into into a chain reaction yawn-fest by deflating his dreadful march to the scaffold, and stamping his disease as boring and the author himself as bored with its "predictability."

Apparently, his father died of the same type of cancer, so it's no surprise to him, to us, to anybody. And to be a top notch thinker, you have to surprise your audience. Or go bust. Ho-hum. Seems Hitchens has gotten too used to talking to like minds and too used to being smarter than anybody else, tete-a-tete. That may still be true. We surely don't want him staring us down and fuming (if he still fumes and you can't light a match around him) and tearing our little thought-cathedrals to pieces.

He is still funny: He informs us that he's lost a startling 14 pounds since starting chemo. Ha! 

He won't be making any appearances on The World's Biggest Loser with those numbers any time soon.  But by crikey, there are readers of Vanity Fair who will pay beau coup bucks for his poison. Skinny is still very chic.

Wait. Why are we writing about this dying man?

Because in a sense, he died a while ago. Dead with his drink at talk shows, dead on that enormously self-indulgent video, The Four Horsemen, he, Richard Dawkins, and a couple of other flyblown anti-Christs sitting around a table agreeing with each other about how awful the religionists are, how illogical, why can't they play fair, all without adding an arse-hair's width of news to the conversation. One imagines more could be learned about atheism from an 18th century charnel house intern. 

Okay. Why pick on Hitchens now that he's dead. After all, doesn't he save the September 2010 fashion issue of Vanity Fair by being a spooky thing in the middle of all that high-falutin, mind-blowing ultra chic hubris? Well, darn it all, maybe we ask too much some times. Ray Carver faced his own death from cancer at 51 and coughed up "A New Path to the Waterfall." There he revealed himself as a terrible poet with only a loving common law wife to see him through the editing process. At least Carver had the good sense to intersperse his conscious journey to inky dark nothingness with works by other actual poets, and he had pretty good taste. A little queer on Chekhov, but that's okay in a dying man. 

What do have we from Mr. Hitchens thus far? At 61, a moratorium on ridicule and irony, prose as bland as his new diet and a report about his own puking incidents to spice things up.

It is true, in the sport of vomiting, one often has to report the act for his/herself. We rarely have witnesses to those low moments and when we do, there is a little nip of shame tucked under our memory of it, never to be erased. But, why Hitch? Why? To emphasize how ill he was, to boast (humbly) that he could appear on TV and also sign books the beautiful day in June when he was told the bad news? Who wouldn't vomit -- ingraciously, violently and preferably on their host? Not Hitch, by gum. He puked like a man. Secretly. Accurately. Stiff upper lip and all that.

What is this bit of mega-insider gossip but a scene from the weekend war story of any heavy drinking braggart? Except, it was the cancer, see. The cancer what allows him to toss his chowder under fire and not lose his shit. Or maybe he did and that part was edited out. Puke story: acceptable. Shitting your pants: C'mon. We have our readership to think about. 

Okay. 

Mostly we're pissed off because the fashions in Vanity Fair, normally recognizable by African field biologists as larval forms of the botfly, and about accessible as an anchorite's vulva, are parading around our very own campuses here in Tiny Town. And a rotting corpse can do nothing to stop this sick fashion procession, so ill, so sad, so much more interesting than any disease currently under study, and here we are speaking of haute couture, the must-have fall fashions, advertised in a journal that fills its void with words by the dead and dying like so much chum in rotten water. The denouement is Lady Gaga (there, she just got a hit), who makes Muhammad Ali's once famed ego seem about the size of a muton. Hitchens is just a sideshow act.

Hitchens says he pitched his tent in the fields of irony and finds no irony in his condition, but my gosh, others have seen to it that irony is not lost on the man. The ultra chic, dying intellectual. My my. Seated in his Washington, D.C. study with columnar stacks of books behind him (is that the chic thing to do, too, just stack your books, fuck shelving them? Or is that just his latest reading, the little brat?). 

Did the cancer get to his talent before it breached security in his lymph nodes? Does that explain the humdrum reviews of his new book Hitch-22, not even a very clever title, or is his dulled wit the work of lifelong enemies, cancer being the latest and most lethal to show itself?

Or IS there a G-d and Hitchens has known this all along and played the D-vil's Advocate and fooled us all? Jeepers. What's wrong with a little ice cream and cake and a fairy tale at the end of this acid bath called life anyway, Hitch?

Hitch: Well, you see, it's simply not accurate.

TTT: Because you say so?

Hitch: Exactly. And the facts speak for themselves. By the way, old fellow (he threw this 'old fellow' bit in for effect, but we took the bait for a sec, Yanks always do), if you're going to be a prick, keep your facts straight.

TTT: Have we not done so?

Hitch: You lack gravitas and a decent education. You are all puff and no ...

TTT: Magic Dragon?

Hitch: See, you Tiny Town folks try to get by just with the clowning. There's nothing behind it, not intellectual depth, not scope, not breadth.

TTT: Scope was a very successful bad breadth wash. The ads were cutting ed --

Hitch: You are wasting my time, maggot.

At just that moment, a fly struck the sash, speaking of which.

TTT: Like that?

Hitchens: Like that.

We could go on. But then, we are not bored with our diseases. Goddammit, we used to care about you, Hitch.

– C. Pembroke Handy, on again, off again, zippity zop

Photo credit: Frankie14850

Tiny Town, USA – There are at least three ginger tabbies living on Short Street.

For the second time this summer, one of them, is missing.

Last time it was Garth, stuck for nine days in a neighbor's shed. This time it is a young, housebound boyo named Ryan. Perhaps he too, trapped in a similar unit or out-building.

At this point, no reward has been offered, but as always, Tiny Town is here to protect and serve and spots $25 for the finder of Ryan, and dares a Short Street resident to match it.

We know everyone's been fleeced by the AIDS Ride for Life, but for once think of someone besides yourself and how cool it is to ride around the lake for a "good cause."

Take heed: your good cause is right there in your neighborhood.

No need to show off. No need to pretend you care.

Just get off your duff and look in your garage or your shed and report to this number every time you see a buff-colored ginger tabby (young, short-haired, full tail, full of the light of life, refer to picture) in that neck of the woods: 229-8822. 

As we tell all our recruits in the Tiny Town Animal Retrieval Unit: "Find That BLANK."

In this case: FIND THAT CAT! 

– C. Pembroke Handy, of late a bit off the mark, but merrily so and no harm done

Tiny Town, USA – Visible proof that the Commies were way ahead of the rest of us, including ahead of the Whig Party, is now wheelchair accessible to one and all.

An area stencil artist has provided us with a historical footnote often overlooked in chronicles of the Underground Railroad.

Now folks, lissen. The better part of wisdom tells one not to shit too close to the nest. But at my advanced age, I can't get out of town fast enough to abide by that, so here goes.

We, the peepholes, are confused by the artwork on the Route 96 underpass along Green Street. Oh, yes. Art work it is compared to the shite passing for public art plastered on the sides of the Green Street parking garage. The persons behind that "art", are, plainly and stately, a bunch of goddamn fools. 

But they let one get away with this random act of historical revision: Harriet Tubman, Communist Sistah. Maybe Malcolm X could say so, maybe Eldridge Cleaver before his visit with Castro converted him into a babbling Christian on Robert Schuler's Hour of Power ... But even the brilliant Frederick Douglass would have to wonder about Harriet being tapped as a "comrade." 

Also this question: Why did the black stencil artist, if we may assume, get the Route 96 underpass? Because his/her message is radical? 

We await word from The Gino Bush League of Street Renamers for the following proposals: the Frederick Douglass Blvd and the Comrade Tubman Thoroughfare. You see, renaming things after dead people fixes history. Personally, we've been banking on a Madame Blavatsky Skyline and a Mahatma Ghandi Blvd., but fair is fair and black is black.

Also, aren't we stealing Harriet from Auburn? According to the history books, she only tarried here when the Underground Railroad, (the original Chunnel from the Deep South to the Streets of Harlem), was still the Native American's equivalent of a Silk Route from the Missouri Breaks to Hard Times. She actually LIVED in Auburn for much of her life.  Is Tiny Town so bereft of heroines we must steal from the less fortunate? 

If Harriet were a Comrade, where does that leave the Beechers? Were they Commies too? Were the Abolitionists really Commies? Did the North fight the South for freedom and Democracy or a Centralized State? 

Think this through, my bruthas and sistahs. Abe Lincoln -- was he really Jewish and a homosexual? Was Robert E. Lee -- the last American who was in fact, fighting to protect states rights and the spread of big government and, with Jefferson Davis, seeking a way to transition slaves to the payroll because England and France [their biggest clients] were pressuring them to do so? 

History is a mess -- like the stenciled lines on the underpass mural which is worthy of closer examination -- but a contained mess. The present is the real problem. I'm as racist as the next person in this town and this is a very racist Tiny Town from all sides of the Sherwin Williams color spectrum. 

But, Comrade Tubman? That kinda throws a monkey wrench in the whole business. Not that there's anything wrong with monkey wrenches. 

– C. Penbroke Handy, some times C. Pembroke Handy, some times someone else entirely.

EIGHT TEATS, TEN PUPS = HELP!!!!: Honey, who was saved by the Van Cort family of Tiny Town, services as best she can her prodigious brood. The number of pups may indicate that she was used as a breeder for dogs. First litters are usually smaller. BELOW: Helping one of the runts. When there are more pups than tits, the x-tras get runted.

Tiny Town, USA – Pitbulls have a bad rep in the world because of assholes who raise them to be killer fighting dogs. In fact, the pitbull is a beautiful loyal and true dog, sweet and solid packed like a big athletic tube sock of affection and when raised right, a good family animal to have around. 

Here's a story about a mama pitbull discovered by Eliza Van Cort's family. The dog was abandoned and apparently lost, as told by Ms. Van Cort:

JP [sic] found a Mama dog shivering in the cold. We ended up letting her into my parents lake house (we were house sitting) and, try not to laugh, after having three kids I felt like she was in labor. And she was!

The SPCA came for her. They spent all night helping her birth 10 puppies two of whom were runts. Eight teets +ten pups + two runts= bad combo.

My incredible 14-year-old nephew has been holding the bigger ones away from the runts every half hour, all day long until about 1 a.m., so they can nurse.

The Mama is the sweetest dog I have ever met in the world. I'm deathly allergic, but keep coming back to hang out with her. She just wants to be cuddled. Period. It's a ton of work for my nephew, or whomever is in the room because you're compelled to sit there and keep get the runts on the teet while keeping the bigger ones from knocking them off. We also bottle feed the runts as much as they'll let us. The SPCA warned us Frodo and Starbuck, as we've named the runts for now, might not make it. But we're trying our best.

If anyone who is incredibly loving and responsible and knows my family personally, would like to check out these amazing creatures, give me a call. The SPCA said they will take our recommendations strongly into consideration when we are done with their fostering period and it's time to place the dogs in permanent homes. I am not exaggerating when I say this is Mama is THE most gentle, loving dog I've ever met. And she's good around other dogs as far as we've seen. She's not a barker and oh, her puppies are adorable. That's my plug. If you're a dog lover who is ready to really commit to taking care of one of these special dogs, please contact me or JP. Oh, and one last thing. . . who the HELL abandons a pregnant dog? Horrifying.

– Eliza Van Cort

For more information on how to meet these pups and possibly adopt, contact  the SPCA or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , (607) 339-9999.

The Van Cort's are serving as a foster family and need all the help they can get from animal lovers, including food and new homes. A well trained PB is a marvelous animal to have as a companion. 

photo credit: Top left, Rachel Philipson, all others, Eliza Van Cort.