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Dec 2018 - Year 20 - Issue 6

ISSN 1755-9715

Uppity’s Test

Robin Usher, Saudi Arabia

Dr Robin Leslie Usher Ph.D. wrote a doctoral thesis `Jungian Archetypes in the work of science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein`, 1992. Teacher of English language and literature since 1994 in Hungary, Poland, Russia, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Oman, Libya, China, Turkey, the Czech Republic, and Azerbaijan. Science fiction writer, 'All For Naught Orphan Ufonaut' in Shelter of Daylight, Sam's Dot Publishing (2010). Published in the British SF academic journal Foundation, `Male And Female He Created Them Both: Beyond The Archetypes` (112), and the Hungarian Institute for Educational Research`s Educatio, `Learning To Study`. Email: robika2001@yahoo.co.uk

                                    

Time for the travelling Doctor, and his fabulously beautiful assistant, Cake, to invade more space and, perforce, use their boxed ears to listen to the coughin` of the sound boreders in the classroom. Practicing the art of the Shaman, students perceive their teacher as a type of Jesus, who hasn`t yet been crucified enough for them to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, `Teacher? May I torture you?` ELT`s favorite joke is disseminated throughout all of the countries where the ELT professional is trying to cadge a drink off a leech, 'We made man from an extract of clay. Then We made him as a drop in a place of settlement. Then We made the drop into an alaqah (leech, suspended thing, blood clot), and then We made the alaqah into a mudgah (chewed substance) ...' Koran (610 - 30 C.E.), Surah 23, Al Mu'minun (‘The Believers'), 12-14. Mosquitos are bloodsuckers that attach themselves to the flesh, and so the Moslem peoples of the Middle East's nations of Islam go to their Mosques to pray to become bigger; but not as big as Allah (God).

Sojourning in the ‘settlement’ of Budapest, Hungary, among ‘the Magyar’ in their own tongue (mudgah), where the Moslem Empire of the Turkish Ottomans once held sway (1541-1649), there are some Chews, and of course Jesus was a Chew; though spelt differently. Islam's Jesus (Isa) wasn't crucified, but rather walked into heaven on Earth in a pair of the sandals that were brand-named after him. Obviously, in the modem age, the Glocks are watching to see if it’s still time, or can the teacher? From the snuff box to the snuff jar, as it were, as the human coffee beans get into their wheeled severals to go home from the school grounds after class:

'Your candle burned out long before your legend ever did.’ - Elton John

The term ‘snuff’ for that genre of film in which people are recorded, usually on video, being killed for entertainment, derives from the method of quenching candlelight, that is, snuffing the flamers, and Marilyn’s death in mysterious circumstances, at the  height of her fame and notoriety as the bedmate of US President, John F. Kennedy, lends pathos to Elton John’s song, ‘Candle In The Wind’ (1974), which received new chart success after England's Princess Diana died, when her car crashed on August 31, 1997, in the Point D'Alma tunnel, Paris, France, pursued by paparazzi motorcyclists getting off a few shots at her, and Elton performed it as a lament:

'Never knowing who to cling to

When the rain set in.’1

The snuff box where  Marilyn was found dead in 1962 was her bedroom, while in 1955 her contemporary, James Dean, had also died in a snuff tin, that is, his sports' car, ‘Little Bastard', a Porsche 550 Spyder, crashed before the release of the film, Giant (1956), in which he starred alongside English rose, Elizabeth Taylor, and Rock 'Spider' Hudson in a story of adultery and oil money. Elvis Presley, 'King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’, a euphemism for the woman on top, but most famous for his ELT ‘round’, ‘Jailhouse Rock’ (1957), pulled a South African soldier out of  a burning tink, during the period in which he was conscripted into the US army (March 24, 1958 - March 2, 1960), doubtless because he thought it could have been himself. Some, of course, were found dead in swimming pools; for example, the untimely death, in 1969 of guitarist Brian Jones of the rock band The Rolling Stones, suggested a pool of talent earmarked by the snuff movie making industry: 'I shouted out, “Who killed the Kennedy’s?” when after all, it was you and me.’2 ('Sympathy For The Devil’; 1968) Like animals for slaughter; after a brief shot in the limelight:

 

'Number forty-seven said to number three:

“You're the cutest jailbird I ever did see.

I sure would be delighted with your company,

Come on and do the Jailhouse Rock with me.”’3

Prisons for straight guys, built by pederasts to give their children AIDS legally, are part of established thinking, which is why ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’4 is a term that makes a short sentence much longer. The terms 'snuff box' and ‘snuff tin' are adapted from the tobacco industry, for example the vampires of British American Tobacco (BAT), where ground tobacco is nasally ingested, that is, snorted, rather than smoked. Of course, tobacco in prison is called ‘snout’, which is the term for a pig’s nose, and smoking is a euphemism for killing, because gun’s smoke. Consequently, the smoker’s coughin’ is a metaphor among the pool of killers in the snuff movie makers' industry, who’re waiting to film and record their victims in the ‘snuff boxes’ and  ‘snuff tins’ of its rooms and cars.

Coffee is ground, like tobacco, so it and the drug it contains, caffeine, are metaphorical coffin homonyms for the illegal snuff genre, which is why the smokers of cigarettes are called 'coffee nails'. As the straights seek to avoid the prisons, so those who’re wielding their short white sticks, pretending to be blind as to what’s really goin’ down, increase the volume of their coughin' until the degenerating hearts of their victims are made to understand, and the Brazilian bean growing mafiosa ensure that caffeine is accepted as a slave’s crutch, before the gates of the Pearly kings open once more to admit the brain damaged and desperate at London’s Wormwood Scrubs.

In Arabic, the word مائي for the indispensably precious stuff of life that is water is, ‘Mayiy.’ It’s a homonym, `May ..?` As everyone is a slave to water, so the teacher is perceived not as a water bearer quenching the thirst for knowledge, but as a type of the figure of Jesus, who needs to be given vinegar, while he`s being crucified in the classroom in order to keep him awake; up on his feet during the torture of sleep deprivation: 'May I talk to you teacher?' Resurrected and filled full of vinegar by the summoning spell, the teacher’s tormented existence is prolonged yet one more sunset until another dawn:

'Eat and drink until the black line can be fully distinguished by you from the white line due to dawn's redness.’ Koran, Surah 2, Al Baqara ('The Cow'), 187.

Most students play a game based on the 1968 film starting actor, Christopher Lee, as the undead vampire that lives by drinking the blood of his  victims, Dracula Has Risen From The Grave: ‘Now my revenge is complete.’5 Coughin’ soundin' bored is the student equivalent of ‘water boarding', a practice familiar to veterans of the Gulf War. Captured prisoners suffocated with wet towels until, coughin` up, they revealed what they`d been concealing from the inquisitors, before their corpses were black bagged, rather than shouldered aloft after having their years boxed.

As the Western Christian teacher is a Jesus` surrogate, the sound boreders look to see if the Jewish Messiah has heard that it’s time for him to emerge from their coughin`, so admitting that he lives in them and has come at least a second time after his first time ended on the cross. Jesus reputedly emerged transfigured from his tomb over 2000 years ago, which is why the Arabs like to keep the doors of their classroom open. During the Roman Empire`s occupation of Jewish Palestine, Jesus was arrested as a `dissident` and taken to the hill of Calvary outside the city of Jerusalem. There he was nailed to a cross of wood and died; despite being given the usual vinegar to prolong his torture before the coughin' crowd.

Jesus Christ, `the chosen`, experienced resurrection and ascension to heaven, according to the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, and the Middle Eastern peoples, like Moslems everywhere who, espousing their religious book of history and instruction, the Koran (610-30 AD), dictated by the angels to the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH), according to Islamic tradition, believe that Jesus (Isa) walked into heaven and wasn`t crucified. Believing that Western Christians are vampires emerging from their coffins, students sound bored religiously, while their religious instructors, the Mutawahs, smile indulgence:

`And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the dusty way to death. Out, out, brief candle! Life`s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.`6

- William Shakespeare

 

`Dubya` Bush might have said, `M`towers?` on 9/11, 2001, when the Moslem terrorists in support of an Independent Levant (IL), that is, a non-Jewish Palestine, hijacked civil airliners to crash into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York city, U.S.A., although the Republican elephant, Trump, might have said admiringly, after the WTC was rebuilt as a single erection, `M`tower.` Before the Moslem Caliphates, the last was the Sassanid (224-651 A.D.), named for the Persian Emperor, Sasan, which featured `towers of silence` to which the corpses of the dead were taken to be picked clean by birds. Consequently, the `birds` flown by Al Qaeda, `the base` terrorists, on September 11th, 2001, to crash into the WTC, were `towers of silence birds` flying in obedience to the Mutawahs of Afghanistan, where Saudi Arabia`s Osama Ben Laden`s terrorist group operated under the auspices of the notoriously misogynist Taliban regime there. The Gulf war resulted from the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, evincing support for Al Qaeda, that is, the vampire `blood drinker` had risen, and the U.S. invaded Iraq in March, 2003, which led to the execution of Saddam Hussein on December 30, 2006, and his putative Iraqi successor Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi`s declaration of a 21st century Moslem Caliphate, consisting of rebels in the states of Iraq and Syria. The boarders of 9/11 were attempting to silence Jesus. Just as the Moslem sound boreders of the ELT classrooms seek to box the years of their teacher.

Armies are abroad upon the Earth, so that they can slay free, because slavery is what their masters are for. It isn’t the role of the classroom teacher to explain to the children that the cars they see on the highroad, and the televisions they watch at home, are the equivalent of Hermann Hesse`s The Glass Bead Game (1943), where the aim is to escape from the paedophile who wants them to remain children so that they`ll be slaves: 'When the world is at peace, when all things are tranquil and all men obey their superiors in all their courses …'7 Escaping slavery by taxis to the College of Nobyu in Saudi Arabia, it struck this Doctor travelling through space, and time with the glamorous Cake, that the bumps constructed in the roads to slow traffic to a reasonable speed were designed by a ‘gamer’. The cars with their windows were the glassed in paedophiles’ beads to worry about, and they were all strung out. Like the heads of snakes on wheels, the noses of the mudgah in their mudjars were close to the grindstone in the snuff mill of the Moloch that devours its inferiors, that is, its children, under the banner of the bone white moon on black.

Driving his take in everyday, our International Driving License (IDL) wielder deposited us at the Nobyu Industrial College (NIC), where the good Doctor, and the pulchritudinous Cake, would spend a month or so attempting to understand why it was that the bigger fish at this locale had determined he shouldn’t be given a desktop computer, so that he'd have to use an abacus to compute the complicated formulas that magically materialized the grades of the students; subsequent of course to their taking of final examinations: or perhaps not. Who could tell? Worry the beads enough and the figures will improve. Inputing, of course, was different from computing, and had its own peculiarly inherent horrors, but meantime it was necessary to stare into the glass of the computer to conceive 100% of an exam as 56, and that the students` marks should then be divided by a quarter, before being multiplied by seven eighths; in order to arrive at a sum below 10 that translated into a quite startlingly large percentile and passing grade.

Anthropological examinations of the web, a.k.a. the net, postulating that people were descended from spiders, suggested that the calculating Arabs, looking to practice fly fishing, were luring Westerners abroad to consume them calculatingly as big fish, and much smaller fry as stocks diminished. Signs of speeders on the highways tended to support the hypothesis of Arabians in quest of more than just a passing acquisition of speederly knowledge, and the several varieties of variegated websites requiring different kinds of inputed logic supported the argument that the Christians' teacher, Jesus, their ‘ Fisher of men’, was perceived as interfering with Islam's internet, which was where they kept Drac', who could only be killed by decaffeination. Teachers from the West were made to live in compounds, because that`s where spiders eyes were:

'I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plane behind me.’8

- T. S. Eliot       

From an infidel`s point of view, Jesus Christ was poet T. S. Eliot`s `the Fisher King` of The Wasteland (1922), having gotten his calculations of surviving as a big fish in the net of the web awry. Correcting the calculating spiders with their guilt compounded Western eyes required a high degree of sounding bored skill on the part of the Moslems in Islam, Cake had suggested to the good Doctor, during an Eid (feast) following the fasting month of Ramadan, which of course would result ultimately in the deaths of the run down calculators.

The protagonist of Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, Knecht, at a school for boys, appealed to the segregated society of Arabs, where girls were severed from boys, each other, and themselves, according to Death Of A Princess (1980) type film reports of decapitated Arabian royal, Misha’al. Going on a head with no trunk to speak of, ‘the long and winding road'9 from the College to the hotel at 6.40 am, and back again each day at 4.00 pm, was obviously a paedophile’s can necked to the modem age. Representing the farmed pupils of the Sacred Heart School For Boys, it was marvy how the big fish gamer drove his take in. Riding roughshod over the bumps, death's  speeders sought to give their fish heart attacks, which of course was why the harder taxis were paid for by those with higher stakes being driven in.

Man may have invented the wheel, but the oil rich Arabs had invented the Riyal, which meant that they could employ better calculations. If the boot of the car represented the computing of life`s chances for survival, the trunk of the car asserted the lifelessness of its decaffeinated head, and the planes` speaking of 9/11 suggested that the slaved, with their wheeled noses to the grindstone of the snuff mill of Moloch, wouldn`t resurrect to ascend to heaven above to colonize the planets among the stars. With the fingers of its best and brightest glued to the keyboarding of the Giant Calculator In The Sky (GCITS), alerting Arabian spiders to their struggles on the web, or the fishers of men to their presence in the keep net, depending on choice metaphor, the brains of the teachers of the West would die futilely keyboarded, and yet still unconverted to Islam; despite all of the efforts of the adherents to the hadith, or ‘sayings’ of the Prophet Mohammed. Required to pray, humans fall prey to the catch that is religion, whose computational program might baffle God herself. Worship, replaced by an international slaving terrorist mafia religiously forcing people to pray at the point of a gun, was `drawing a bead` on ELT professionals as a part of its game of class warfare.

Nobyu College was proud to display the latest co-operational standard borne flagship of niceness everywhere from the British Council, the APTIS test, which had rapidly been reinterpreted as the Uppities test. As one of the few caffeine colored people on site, I could only observe that being read wouldn't cover my embarrassment at being asked by the administration to supervise the Uppities. Doubtless there'd be sniggering in the corridors of Whitehall among the slavers' establishment looking to establish slay free through the power of their armies and leggies upon the Earth once again. Yet for the ELT pro in hot far climes staggering beneath the yoke, and indeed the joke, it was but another nail in the boxed years of the coffin of the classroom. As Jesus was nailed up to prevent his escaping the blood drinking vampires, who sought victims who’d forever accept that another's sickness should be theirs, and die accordingly in their stead, so the Shamanist victimizers remained eternally youthful, while their scapegoats eternally died and, while 'Islam' means 'accept God', the Uppities were accused of not respectfully accepting their slavery.

Shirts are obviously at a premium in the Middle East. At least judging by the quantities lost. Shirt-lifting of course is one of the hazards of daily life most hotly denied by the Islamicists, whose belief in Islam closely approximates to that of the Judeo-Christian who believes in the heavenly city of Jerusalem, although for Moslems heaven is on Earth, and is the paradise of Jennah that the Moslem Isa (Jesus) walked into without experiencing crucifixion. Simply, to Moslems Jesus Christ was the devil being crucified by devil worshippers, because that's what devils like to do together, whereas for Moslem believers in Islam, Isa (Jesus) wasn't crucified, because he didn't accept it. If he did, he'd almost certainly have had his shirt lifted by the thieves as well.

Staying at the Funny Sean's hotel in Bahrain for three days en route to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to teach at the peculiarly titled, Fish Slab College, because of the fish market several miles away next to the apartment block where the Western teachers would be residing during their bodacious sojourning, it became an item of inestimable amusement to place my shirts in the local laundry only to be told that the mini-bus to Riyadh would be leaving that night. Several hundred shirts were lost. If it weren’t for the lift, a bigger busser might have caught me.

The Fish Slab College was a delight. Asked to make a slideshow with an appropriate ELT theme to introduce oneself to stiff members and ministrations, the good Doctor, and the delectable Cake, chose Premonition as the Hitchcockian title of what, in traditional Arabic stylee, finally amounted to a movie devoid of movement. Staff, administrators and students were all alarmed at the prospect of failing to achieve the success demanded of them by the College Proctors with their cattle prods. Consequently, the 1 hr 37 min and 34 sec vid' ( https://youtu.be/XR5hbEzTwpI ) began with a shark in the water, and the tense music of composer, John Williams (not the Grand Slam 70s Welsh rugby wing from Nantyffyllon), from the movie Jaws (1975), which precedes the biting off of the legs of the teenage swimmers in the sea by a great white. Presented as motivating, the audience were subjected to the finny principle in the form of a joke in which the teachers are described as having left a plane about to take off, because the students had built it, while a single teacher refuses to get off in the belief that, if the students built it, the engines won't work. Everyone needs to be pulling together, as it were, to escape the shark; coming: soon be there.

Comes the voice of Martin Luther King Jnr's black activist speech for Civil Rights, during the height of protests against racism in the U.S.A., on August 28, 1963, 'I have a dream that one day I will not be judged by my appearance, but on the content of my character!’ For the ELT crowd, I suspect being judged at all is thought of as an anathema revelatory of others' desire to imprison them in the slammer. Sex symbol, Marilyn Monroe, star of the film, Some Like It Hot (1959), is heard extolling the virtues of acceptance, 'Don't stop when you are tired. Stop when you are done.’ After the stake's driven in; presumably. Bill Gates of Microsoft has this advice for the bums on the spit, 'If you're born poor, it's not your mistake; but, if you die poor, it's your mistake.’ Miss Steak could only agree as chop stewed for the BBQ. The inventor of us as a light bulb, Thomas Edison (1847-1931), chips in, 'Our greatest weakness lies in giving up.’ Mohammed Dali, the k.o. specialist Spanish surrealist paint boxer of advanced years, and with his trademark handlebar moustache audibly bristling, delivers this stinging comment, ‘It's difficult to be humble when you're as great as I am.’ Basketballer, Michael Jordan, humbly concurs, 'I have failed many times in my life and that is why I succeed.’ It takes a big man to admit he's a coffee.

Greg Thomson, who wrote First 100 Hours (2009), says what all students of ELT want to hear, 'The only normal way to begin speaking in a new language is to begin speaking badly.’ Judging by the students' response to that, Greg has a best seller on his hands. The vid' culminates in a rousing rendition of, 'How Many Rainbows Do You See?' After the subliminal United Colors of Benetton advertising ( my PayPal email address is robinusher@yahoo.co.uk ), it was back to the reality of language laboratories devoid of audio equipment and recordings, a handicap it was necessary to surmount in order to avoid drawing attention to the slavers’ lack of conscience. Accused by the students of finding inappropriate supplementary Borem Forum material online, so that they could complete pertinent exercises from Listening and Speaking 1 or 2, without the audio material that ought to have come with the book, but didn't, the good Doctor and his nubile assistant, Cake, hit on the expedient of downloading the needed mp3 audio files onto a flash drive before giving it to a trustee among the collegiates for distribution. Alas, flashdrive, mp3s and trustee were never seen again by the ELT pro.

Experience as Regional Director at the Zany Technical College in Riyadh, saw 400 SAR spent on a color printer with bottles of ink, so to print pages from the students' coursebook, Douched One, because usage of modernity's technological miracles in ELT is so choked off as to resemble a petrol cap without a car. Travelling to the ZTC each day, it wasn't possible to open the vehicle from the inside. The occupants had to wait for the driver to get out and open it. Equally, if I closed the door of the RD's office, it couldn't be opened from the outside. I had to leap from the desk at a moment's notice, or admit the hoi polloi by leaving the door open permanently in case the spirit of Jesus rose from my coughin' and couldn't get off, while hoping it wouldn't shut with me and them within, and no one able to open it from without. Going over to the ZTC 'phone shop next door, I was told by the sales' assistant that the number handwritten by the border patrol guard on my entrance visa was inaccurate, and I couldn't have the sim card for the 'phone that I'd need to use if I had a heart attack inside the office that couldn't be opened from the outside once I was securely ensconced in it, but I could have the ZTC modem.

Heart beating crazily with anxiety, I handed over the dosh to the coercive extortionate. A few days later I got my iqama residence permit on the strength of the passport stamp's number, and the heart began to beat more strongly. On my next visit to the larger more superheroic ZTC facility located in uptown Riyadh, I was told that I could have a sim card, but the sales' assistant couldn't install it in the modem I'd almost uselessly kept since my previous visit to the KSA, unless it was first cancelled, and I'd need to show my iqama. Displaying the permit that the previous ZTC assistant had said I couldn't possibly have  gotten, because of an inaccurately numbered entrance visa, I whistled out onto the darkling thoroughfare with a sim, a modem, and still no hope of being able to use either in the event of the heart attack that I, coffee ‘n’ Cake’s man, had skryed as being planned by the jarred beans undulating in the heat as they wound their wheeled labyrinthine way from the school grounds in search of percolation.

Travelling 45 minutes by mini-bus there, and back to the accommodation each working day at the Institute, meant that the 40 hour working week was augmented by a further week's travelling time. In other words, a five week month. Eyeing the bumps in the road, as the bus laboriously slowed to haul us over the coal’s tar broiling in the heat of the desert, the traffic appeared as a huge many headed bodiless snake on wheels. As one eye looked ahead, the other looked back, and the snake eyes of the monster failed to meet in the middle as, its eyes cross forever, it perversely undulated. The jailors had developed the mobile electric chair, together with an operator that helped to throw the switches that disabled its vehicle and itself. So it was that the disabled pedalers treadmilled the failing hearts of the elocuted children of Moloch.

In the 14th century, the Italian Roman Catholic, Alighieri Dante, wrote The Divine Comedy of Paradiso, Purgatorio, and the Inferno that awaited the guilty of God's judgment, but it was the modem age that revealed how the serpent, Satan, looks. At the side of each bump in the road, built to accentuate the undulations of the decapitated snake's head on wheels, large stone pink colored balls emphasized the role of the cars in The Glass Bead Game of Misbahah, which is the name of the Moslem prayer beads strung as the 99 names of God. Used in a way similar to the Catholic rosary by the devoted prayerful, the glassed in occupants going in a head look to make it to the airport to escape the paedophile slavers of childhood; as adults who don’t believe in the fathers of devouring war.

 

  1. John, Elton 'Candle In The Wind', Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, MCA, 1974.
  2. Jagger, Mick, and Keith Richards, The Rolling Stones, 'Sympathy For The Devil’, Beggars Banquet, Decca, 1968.
  3. Leiber, Jerry, and Mike Stoller ‘Jailhouse Rock’, Elvis Presley, Jailhouse Rock, MGM, 1957.
  4. `For the monarchy and the church of England`, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antidisestablishmentarianism .
  5. Lee, Christopher as Dracula in Dracula Has Risen From The Grave, Hammer, 1968.
  6. Shakespeare, William MacBeth, 1606, V, v, l. 22-28.
  7. Hesse, Herman The Glass Bead Game (transl. Mervyn Savill), Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1943.
  8. Eliot, T. S. The Wasteland, Part V, ‘What The Thunder Said', The Dial, 1922, l. 423-4.
  9. Lennon, John, and Paul McCartney 'The Long and Winding Road', Let It Be, Apple, 1970.
  • Remembering Simon Greenall. Some Tributes

  • Uppity’s Test
    Robin Usher, Saudi Arabia

  • A Grammatical Misunderstanding Between Two Native Speakers of English
    Jamie Keddie, Spain