<\/p>\n
Sometimes, I welcome writers block.\u00a0 I like to believe it’s like being poisoned by a beautiful woman so that she can rape me and steal my wallet – a privilege<\/em>. At least, in my book.\u00a0 Things like that only happen to important people.\u00a0 People like me, we get stabbed 13 times in the kidney by an eight year old ATM robber.<\/p>\n I’ve had writers block for a while now.\u00a0 Officially.\u00a0 I’ve kept it a secret.\u00a0 I’ve had my secretary lie and I’ve unearthed old writing from my Cold File, spreading it out as recently completed work.\u00a0 I’ve smiled and lied and danced.\u00a0 It’s all over now, though.\u00a0 I’ve exhausted the Cold File, I’ve come to the end of my lies and my dances.<\/p>\n I tried all the old tricks to get out.\u00a0 The whole “All work and no play…” thing for 50 pages, murdering my girlfriend and stabbing people in the kidney 13 times. No luck.<\/p>\n When I was growing up, they had that Friday the 13th<\/sup>: The Series<\/em>.\u00a0 Remember that?\u00a0 It didn’t have anything to do with the movie, it was just some misguided, insane attempt to cash in on the films.\u00a0 The show was Highlander<\/em>-standard Vancouver stuff about two cousins who inherited an antique store from their uncle.\u00a0 They soon discovered that all of the antiques had been cursed by the devil and it was now up to them to use the sales registry to go out and recover the cursed antiques before hell came to earth.\u00a0 Each item had a certain power but, for the buyers to access it to further their own nefarious desires, they had to kill – feed the items souls.\u00a0 So, episode after episode, the two cousins and their elderly advisor pursued blood-thirsty madmen and recovered antique watches and water glasses and lamps.\u00a0 It was actually a passable show that enjoyed a three year run, though the last year isn’t worth it.<\/p>\n My point is that I’d love some cursed antique to help me get back to a productive writing schedule. \u00a0But now I want to continue on this tangent.\u00a0 Friday the 13th<\/sup><\/em> starred “Robey,” this delicious redhead with a killer body.\u00a0 As a kid, I always thought she was porn star, because of the one name thing.\u00a0 I’ve searched high and low for a porn career, but no luck outside of a few soft-core flicks.\u00a0 She’s actually rock singer Louise Robey, who went on to marry the Earl of Buford and retired from the entertainment business.\u00a0 So my next step was to find out what the wife of an Earl is called.\u00a0 It’s not Earless, is it?\u00a0 Because then that would mean she was missing ears.<\/p>\n Days of research, conducted from my writing office where I usually write my writing when I am writing but am instead masturbating my master when I’m not writing, led me to an interesting fact:\u00a0 The wife of an Earl is a Countess.\u00a0 So what’s the point?\u00a0 Why not just face facts and call yourself a Count, then?\u00a0 At least your wife is honest.\u00a0 So then I found out that an Earl is British for Count.\u00a0 The Brits don’t have Counts.\u00a0 This really throws me, because, then, they do have Countesses.\u00a0 Why thumb your nose at Count and not at Countess?\u00a0 That doesn’t even begin to make sense to me.<\/p>\n Count comes from the Roman rank of comes<\/em>, like comes except pronounced comes<\/em>. See?\u00a0 A Count was in charge of a – wait for it – county.\u00a0 Which makes an Earl in charge of an Earldom.\u00a0 Except Britain has counties.<\/p>\n So here’s the fun part.\u00a0 The Brits do have Viscounts, whatever the fuck they do.\u00a0 The Count thing is all over the place except for where it counts.\u00a0 (Hah!\u00a0 See, that’s coming from behind the writer’s block right there, baby.\u00a0 Cutting edge humor.\u00a0 I’m the Earl, baby.)<\/p>\n There’s actually a depressingly mundane explanation to the whole Earl\/Count thing.\u00a0 Earl comes from the Middle English, taken from the phrase “Whatchoo doingk today , Sven?\u00a0 Killingk soom moor Saxons, eh? It’s a pretty day foor de Plague!” (that’s to be read in a comical Scandinavian accent, by the way, otherwise the joke falls flat, and having one of my jokes fall flat is against the Danelaw.)\u00a0 Allegedly, Earl (which means, in Norse, \u2018nobleman,’ tee-hee) was selected to replace “Count” at some point in history because “Count” looked an awful lot like “cunt.”\u00a0 Seriously.\u00a0 It’s late-Middle Ages political correctness at work.\u00a0 That is the only explanation for using Earl, and they’re proud of it, too.\u00a0 See?\u00a0 We’re cleaner<\/em> than the Europeans. Our brutal, raping, murdering low-level peerage are sensitive<\/em> to the public.\u00a0 You don’t want your children misspelling count and learning bad things!\u00a0 Now, let’s cunt to ten… Oh god!\u00a0 Sorry!\u00a0 How many horses are you selling at market?\u00a0 I only cunt six… Oh god!\u00a0 I can’t stop!\u00a0 Please, draw and quarter me for stealing hay, you cunt!<\/p>\n All of this is meaningless because “Earl” is a made up title.\u00a0 The real power, early on, fell to the sheriffs, like the Sheriff of Nottingham, and Earls have just sort of carried over like bad pennies.\u00a0 The point becomes moot because the official way you address an Earl is Lord.\u00a0 The Lord of Nothing!\u00a0 It’s all yours!\u00a0 Lord of a poisoned world!\u00a0 That’s right!\u00a0 Take it all!\u00a0 I’m headed to the escape shuttle!\u00a0 It’s all over, Lord of chaos!<\/p>\n So Robey is a big nobody.\u00a0 She’s the Lady Louise Robey.\u00a0 So I went looking for the Earl of Burford and discovered that he isn’t an Earl at all.\u00a0 It’s some sort of special title that the first son of the Duke of St. Albans gets. \u00a0\u00a0That means Robey is a somebody, I guess, whenever the Duke of whatever kicks it.<\/p>\n Robey’s Earl of Burford is also very outspoken for the rights of hereditary peers to…something something.\u00a0 Be allowed to kill peasants, I think.\u00a0 He’s very English, as you can tell from his name:\u00a0 Charles Francis Topham de Vere Beauclerk.\u00a0 He’s also certifiable, as, besides restoring the rights of peerage, he also believes that his direct ancestor ghost wrote Shakespeare’s plays.<\/p>\n Just think of it.\u00a0 Robey left behind her tit-flashing movie career, her low-grade TV career and her rock music career (best known for doing a cover of “One Night in Bangkok” which was a runaway number one hit in Montreal, which is a city located on Jupiter) for some loony Englishman with a fake title and a name that sounds suspiciously terrorist, if you’re asking me.\u00a0 Like Homeland Security red alert.\u00a0 Charles…okay… Francis…uh-huh…Tophamdevereem–stop stop!\u00a0 What are you doing?\u00a0 What’s happening!\u00a0 oh god I am not good with computers…<\/p>\n Everyone get down!\u00a0 Pa-kow, pa-kow, pa-kow!!<\/p>\n Okay, you caught me, I don’t have a writing office.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[352],"tags":[353,160,127],"class_list":["post-2504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gsarchive","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008","tag-women","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2504"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2752,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2504\/revisions\/2752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}