August 4, 2010

B&V,

It is always good to hear from friends in the Mother Country. The immediate good news from Albion is that ½ gallon of Tanqueray is now $3 less than it was. That savings enables me to keep my lime supply really fresh.

Your kind words about my awards

HORSE’S ASS OF THE WEEK

POMPOUS FART OF THE MONTH

SMARMY BASTARD OF THE YEAR

prompted me to reminisce on how they started.

The first winner in 1992, even before my awards were named, was Judge Carole Ferentz.

She was a New Jersey Superior Court Judge, Superior Court being the entry level state court. As I was entering a period of constant “disfavor with fortune and men’s eyes” I was appearing before her pro se. By that time I had appeared in United States District Court, United States Bankruptcy Court, United States Tax Court, United States Appellate Court [5th & 10th Circuit], and had a matter settled by the Supreme Court of the United States the preceding year. Despite zealous representation, despite impassioned pleas, despite histrionics from both sides and the Bench, there was a general feeling of respect between and amongst the participants. It was almost palpable.

My reason for being there that day was to bring a stay notice issued and signed by a New York State Appellate Judge. It involved a civil dispute over an accountant’s bill of $5,000. The trustee of the accounting firm got a default judgment against me in Manhattan. The matter was transferred to New Jersey, my state of residence, for enforcement. Judge Ferentz was the lucky winner of my matter.

In the meantime I found the cancelled $5,000 check. I went to Manhattan with the documents and found a New York State Appellate Judge who agreed with my conclusion.
Someone had blundered at the accounts receivable level. I was in the process of undoing the effects of the mistake. The New York Judge vacated the judgment against me. I brought the documents with me for my next appearance before Judge Ferentz. [I always thought she was nasty, that she became the paradigmatic template for smarminess, because she failed, repeatedly failed, at her entry level job which was to be a perpetual succubus. If she had succeeded she would have become the first steatagynous succubus. Ah yes, the road not taken…]



I wore Gucci loafers that were a brisk walk shy of being officially “down at the heels”. Thank God it didn’t rain that day. I also wore a custom tailored monogrammed shirt figuring that each would cancel out the other.

Before I got to appear before Ma Barker an elderly attorney began to speak. He said that it had been 20 years since he had been in a court room. He never got to say his next sentence because Her Majesty, Judge Snotnose Catshit, tore into him. In a loud, nasty, condescending tone of voice she berated him with remarks such as “I’m not running a refresher course for old lawyers”. After humiliating him she accepted his papers and dismissed him.

Then it was my turn.

She remembered me from my first appearance. I stated the facts of the matter and then was going to hand over the stay from New York. I always like to help people out so I reminded her what the Constitution, the one that came out of that summer in Philadelphia in 1787, said about each state accepting the records of each other state. I was going to give her a simple primer on James Madison when she interrupted me in a rage. One of the highlights of her rather unjudicial temperament was the froth coming down the right side of her mouth as she shouted that she had no choice but to accept the document. She also yelled “what goes around comes around”. I am still not sure what that meant but I figured it was something that Thomas More would never have said. To be fair maybe it was, y’know what I’m sayin’, her special time of the month. Thank God she wasn’t walking the fence line at Gitmo or, heaven forefend, running a nuclear weapons platoon.

Thus was born

SMARMY BASTARD OF THE YEAR

There is a marvelous scene in “The Lion in Winter” where Henry the Second screams at the young French king that “you are not a king because your ass is wrapped in purple”. So it is with Judges. Imagine if every catamount with a gavel whose ass is wrapped in black got to be called Judge. Someone like that deserved to be memorialized. Someone like Judge Ferentz. I’m sorry that I never got to see you on the Bench. One of the benefits of wearing a powdered wig is that you can pull it down over your eyes if the going gets out of hand.

HORSE’S ASS OF THE WEEK came with the arrival of Vice President Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. He was/is/shall be so God Damn dumb he couldn’t find his ass using both his hands in a mirror lined phone booth. He was such an easy target that I named him HORSE’S ASS EMERITUS. By taking him out of the competition I made it easier for others to garner their well justified laurels. The current Vice President, Curly Biden, named Curly in honor of the smartest Stooge, has been in the White House less than two years. Already he is showing tremendous staying power by his perpetual assault on common sense.

Next was the category

POMPOUS FART OF THE MONTH

I’ll get to your country presently but in mine there is one man for whom the term was invented. Pompous farts suffer from “non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome”. [If you need a translation send a SASE] Senator Jay Forbes Kerry, the man who ran for President in 2004, will someday be on a stamp as the very model of a modern borborygymous windbag. He is married to Tereza, the madcap Gypsy woman. Using Tess’s checkbook he just had a $7,000,000 yacht built in New Zealand. He lives in Massachusetts, a state with a long and proud shipbuilding tradition. He also tried to beat the state sales tax by registering it in another state. His apology when caught with his hand in the taxpayers’ cookie jar was the typical modern American Liberal canard. “Just a book keeping error besides I always meant to pay the tax.”

The rules for earning my awards, not just for being “mentioned in dispatches”, are hard but flexible. Hard because I don’t believe in cheapening the brand; flexible because I am the judge and the jury and exceptions are made for exigent circumstances. I have committee of one, me, that handles all appeals. No appeal has ever been successful.

As to your country…

I hope QE2 lives forever.

Failing that I hope she gets to bury Prince Chucky. That he is a HORSE’S ASS cannot be denied. “I am here to save the world.” Don’t get this guy a crown. Get him a wire hanger covered in aluminum foil. That he is an undeniable POMPOUS FART there is also no doubt. I say that because he believes it he is going to save the world. Only someone who has never stood in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles could say such a thing. Yet he does not rise to the level of SMARMY BASTARD because bastards are no longer contenders for the throne and because as soon as he found out that his mom would have to die for him to get his job he earned an indulgence.

Amy and I had dinner in one of the underground restaurants at the Stafford in London. It was called the “Better Hole” as in “if you can find a better ‘ole go to it”. Yet another reminder of the Great War. The inn keeper showed me the guest signature book with the name Wales on one page. “Prince of or Shamu”, I asked. He was not amused. The lamb was spectacular.

As you can see I take my job as seriously as Scaramouche. “He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” It’s dark and dangerous work. I feel that if I don’t do it the terrorists win. I don’t curse at people. While I have never been arrested I have been visited by police for things I have written. Incidentally, the dirtiest, most vicious campaign in this country was the Presidential election of 1800. And it was done before electricity. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, ran against President John Adams; one of the most revered of our Founding Fathers. No political campaign – with the possible exception of 1876 – was dirtier.

As to the FBI showing up, Deo Volente, it would make my day.

While our countries may be separated by a common language we share a common legacy. We have rights that are ours at birth, “rights from beyond the stars”, that less than 10 countries in the world have. My First Amendment begins with the majestic words “Congress shall make no law…”

It was your countryman, the great Doctor Johnson, who said “How sad of all the things that man endures how few laws or kings can cause or cure”. As soon as we have a tree that produces 3 crops a year of “rainbow stew” I will stop writing.

I turn as always to the last lines of Ulysses, the one by Tennyson, your countryman not the one by Joyce, mine.

My three granddaughters just went back to Texas. I like to think that what I do I do for them. Until the wheel starts to turn in my favor all I can do is put markers down for them screaming that we are a free people. I want them to start where I leave off. Something about striving, seeking, finding, and never, never yielding.

If you ever wonder why I always use my full name and address at the bottom of my balistas it is because I would want a stranger to know who wrote what he just read.




Kevin Smith


PS – I still haven’t heard from the Admiralty. Do you suppose they’re still mad about John Paul Jones?