Articles
How is the cow?
November 24, 2023
By Johnny Mustard
Once a plebe, always a plebe it seems.
At West Point, back in the day, anyway, we had a shiteload of "poop" we had to learn, memorize actually, by heart, and be able to regurgitate it any time, usually with our necks back, and sometimes at the top of our voices.
It was a beautiful and instructive form of hazing, of course, and I still have my Bugle Notes '79, all 320 pages of it, and sponsored by, among others, Mama Leone's Ristorante and SeaBreeze Travel Agency, sitting on my desk as I write this.
Read the rest of the story here.
A cadet will not lie...
October 4, 2023
By Johnny Mustard
I'm proud of my college GPA. It was a 2.0.
No joke.
I was thinking about this recently when an old friend and Naval Academy grad asked me what I thought of the recent West Point cheating scandal.
Here's my roundabout and always autobiographical and somewhat self-indulgent take.
Put on your best face.
January 15, 2023
By Johnny Mustard
I was watching a late-night talk show recently and the featured guest was Gwen Stefani. I was never a big fan of her music–even though she’s very talented, no doubt– except for a cover she did of a Christmas favorite, Oi to the World by The Vandals. It‘s right up there with Joey Ramone’s Merry Christmas, I don’t want to fight tonight.
I didn’t recognize her. At all. Her face was so cellophane-y, her eyes narrowed to a severe squinty Japanese parody, her hair wicked, wicked blonde and ironed board straight, her lips like Cupid’s balloons. I couldn’t believe it. She used to have such a pixie-punk appeal, an almost whimsical snarl, and the charming chirp of an underfed weasel. WTF?
Read the rest of the article here.
Claws and Effects.
November 15, 2022
By Johnny Mustard
My peppery Jewish lady pal A. admonished me on a late-night call shortly after I got divorced, saying “Are you dating age-appropriate women?” Which made me ask right back, rhetorically of course “Are you kidding me? I then continued, out of disingenuousness and with a mild poke of impudence and guilt – “Um, is there such a thing as age-appropriate hookers?” I could hear her silent head-nod loud and clear over the phone.
Read all about my lubricious misadventure here.
Dropping the bomb.
November 3, 2022
By Johnny Mustard
Operation Meetinghouse was a series of air raids over Tokyo by the U.S. Army Air Force in WWII, specifically the nights of 9th-10th of March, 1945, and is the single most destructive firebombing operation in the history of the universe. More than16 square miles of the city center were leveled flat and everything man-made was basically erased. Approximately 100,000 civilians were killed in that 48-hour period, most incinerated immediately to ash in the hellfire-like heat. In comparison, the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki only killed between 40-80,000 people.
Read the rest of the all-too-real morality tale here.
Sabrina and Caesar Salad for Supper.
October 14, 2022
By Johnny Mustard
Any dream dinner starts with the mise en place, and mine was out in the numbing aloneness of the mighty dangerous Pacific Ocean. And ended with me staring longingly into the charming aloneness of Audrey Hepburn's eyes...
But I had to first catch my hare, so-to-speak.
Find out how, and with whom, and where and when here.
They're out there.
October 1, 2022
By Johnny Mustard
"Do not lean on your own understanding." – Proverbs, 3:5.
John the Gin Guy and I are having a drink at the White Horse Tavern, "The Oldest Tavern in America"– our famous just-down-the-street-a-bit neighbor, founded way back when heliocentrism was still considered "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture." Think about that for a minute. We've come a long way, baby.
Find out how long here.
I fought the law and the law won.
September 11, 2022
By Timothy Cataldo
All laws are created equal, but some are more equal than others. No, not those, I’m talking about the unwritten ones, Murphy’s being the gold standard: widely-quoted, widely-parodied and riffed, but true down to the atom in almost every scenario imagined or lived by anyone and everyone everywhere in the world who’s ever fooked up.
Let me tell you a story. Click here to hear it.
Up Mayo!
July 2, 2022
By Johnny Mustard
A Soldier’s Song is not something you hear every day at a polo match in Newport, Rhode Island, sung and slurred and slushed, out of tune and at the top of their lungs by a bleacher-full of happy, sunburned drunks, almost all Irish J1ers, but then again I never thought I’d see a Gaelic football match deep in the Bronx, New York either.
But that had happened to me last week – read all about it here.
