Entertainment For Lively Minds
An acquired taste for moon sausage
In my record shop (where the 7 inch singles will forever be played backwards and at the wrong speed in tribute to the late John Peel) there will be a small section of shelving reserved for albums that were made during the 1980s and early 90s by bands who were popular in the sixties.
These curates eggs document a troubled period in the life of groups whose rise to popularity coincided with the age of Aquarius. Now in middle age - with the fires of creativity that drove them in their youth having died down, and the void they once filled with music overflowing with the trappings of their success - band members who once lived a few streets away from each other find themselves separated by different time zones, sharing very little in common beyond a contractual obligation to record music together, the expectations of a dwindling fan base and an earlier body of work that in most cases cannot be surpassed or even equalled.
It must have been bewildering for bands of this era, reunited by a mixture of nostalgia and market forces, to step back into a world where the sitar was extinct and their former position at the vanguard of the counter culture had been usurped by groups like Wang Chung and Huey Lewis and the News. The temptation to dress up in powder blue suits, like extras on Miami Vice, and record a song that sounded a bit like The Safety Dance by Men Without Hats, must have been unbearable. It’s around this time that the spotlight dims, album sales falter and there is nothing to be done other than to dig in and await the return of musical credibility usually heralded by the arrival of Rick Rubin.
When my friend Heinz offered to lend me a bootleg cassette of the Crosby Stills and Nash album Live It Up, which he had purchased while in India, I glanced at the cover and instinctively knew that it would be one of the worst records ever committed to tape, and for this reason I would enjoy it immensely.
Released in 1990, Live It Up is the archetypal piece of shit album that all bands of this vintage release if they stay together long enough. It manages to be out of touch in every way imaginable from the dated production and instrumentation, the naive world view and the half-arsed lyrics shackled to unsuitable tunes. The songs all seem to have come about either as a result of lightweight jams or as half-baked ideas passed without criticism by band members who lacked the passion or the energy to argue with each other. The end result, while undeniably poor, is strangely endearing. I’ve listened to Live It Up more than any other CSN album. I retain the same fondness for it as I do for The Grateful Dead’s studio swansong - Built To Last which was recorded around the same time and is almost as atrocious. It’s records like these make me mourn the loss of those 60s icons who did not live to see the 1980s. I have a feeling that Jim Morrison would have done something monumentally awful with synthesisers and drum machines had he survived. His premature death in a Parisian bathtub robbed the world of a truly ghastly record.
A feature common to all inconceivably rotten albums is a cover that - like the garish colours displayed by certain species of insects warning predators of an unpleasant tasting meal - alerts the listener to the sequence of unpolished turds contained therein.
The baffling cover that graces Live It Up is shot from the perceptive of someone standing on the surface of the moon looking back through space towards Earth. In the foreground a quartet of sausages on sticks (or to use the American vernacular: Wieners) await a roasting on an unseen campfire. A dash of surrealism is supplied by the telephone engineers who are in the process of scaling these improvised skewers. The sharpened point of the stick second to the left has snapped off (a dig at the absent Neil Young?), the escapee cocktail sausage caught in the act of drifting into orbit where it will no doubt present a menace to future moon missions, impaling comets and rogue satellites, eventually becoming the first space kebab.
This image would be a strong candidate for the worst album cover ever if it wasn’t for the lingering suspicion that there is some grand concept in play that is going completely over your head but which everybody else gets.
Another quirk of the shockingly bad album is that it will contain one extraordinarily good song that serves to highlight the unremitting awfulness of the rest of the material. This is so that when you bring the record up in conversation and remark on how appalling it is, your chin-stroking, music-loving friend can counter:
“Yeah, but it’s got _________ on it.”
At which point you can nod sagely and maybe if you are feeling adventurous make some comment about the quality of the bass playing.
The really good track on Live It Up comes courtesy of Stephen Stills and Kevin Cronin from REO Speedwagon. It’s called Haven’t We Lost Enough? and is a simple acoustic blues number, weighted down by Still’s weather-beaten voice. Listened to in the context of Live It Up, it sounds like a song kidnapped from a far better album being held against its will.
For a band synonymous with the 1960s, desperately trying to sound with the times, the irony of Live It Up is that they fall short by several years with most of the album mired in the depths of the 1980s. To be fair the title track was committed to tape in a separate session in 1986. In it Crosby, Stills & Nash attempt to address their original fan’s concerns that they may have strayed from the hippie ideal with reassurances that they don’t need money, designer clothes and 40 room apartments in Bel Air to have a good time. I particularly like the line “don’t need no dealer pushing me around” because it conjures a mental image of a portly and dishevelled David Crosby sporting a wounded look and spouting archaic hippie jargon while being prodded by a pair of denim jacket wearing 80s street thugs.
Another early high/low point, depending on your outlook, is a song called Tomboy about a girl who “can really drive, she ain't afraid of nothing,' `cept maybe boys with their minds on lovin'.”
Yours and Mine takes the laziest of swipes at the troubles in Northern Ireland and an unnamed Third World conflict although apparently “there is no Third World, it happens to us all.
There's just one world and the kids are the first to fall.” It’s lines like these that make Phil Collins’ Another Day In Paradise sound like insightful social commentary.
(Got To Keep) Open, which stresses the importance of individuality and me time in relationships, is set to an incongruous tropical backing track making it a Club Tropicana for couples who have gone on holiday to a Caribbean island in an attempt sort out their marital problems.
Elsewhere, Straight Line dramatically waters down the essence of the Tina Turner’s air-punching power ballad - Simply The Best to a credo that can be best summed up as: Walk in a straight line and maybe you’ll get where you need to be. You might not, but stay strong anyway.
The album’s inspired nadir After The Dolphin begins in the most brilliant way possible with a fake radio news report delivered in the plummy tones of the BBC World Service. As far as I can tell it’s about the aerial bombing of The Dolphin Tavern in London, during a World War I - a Graham Nash-penned protest song about zeppelin warfare written on synthesisers, centring an obscure event that occurred around 75 years in the past. It’s like Neil Young waiting until the Kent State Massacre was a cultural artefact rather than a raw open wound and then writing Ohio.
“The armies of warfare will never be the same again,” we are solemnly informed before the trio step back into the mix, harmonising on backing vocals while further excerpts from radio news reports play over the top.
I have to admit that until this weekend I hadn’t played Live It Up for a while. I listened to it again yesterday with a broad smile plastered across on my face as I was reacquainted with how spectacularly bad it is. Everybody has a few dreadful albums in their collection that they have grown to love. This is one of mine.
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Mr Ellen
If this article doesn't appear in full in the next issue of The Word I shall cancel my subscription
Well, I´ve already read it and so have you
Why should I, like, pay for something that I can get for, like, free on the internet?
Really enjoyed it, though!
Hey
they recycle my shit all the time...
Collins has been off form for months, give Backwards a go in 'Whatever'
I suggest as a compromise that DH
read it aloud on the next podcast.
The Dead's greatest 'moon sausage' must be
'Go To Heaven'.
It was (I seem to recall) the only sleeve to feature a portrait of the band. Can you tell why?
To be fair, the music inside was OK but that sleeve...
and the saving grace thereon imo
would be Althea:
Good heavens!
The bloke in the back row on the right looks like he's about to piss himself laughing!
Excellent post Mr Seven by the way. I am trying to think of my own Moon Sausage album and am struggling. But I'd say that for a hell of a lot of bands in my lifetime, album number two had a certain moon sausage quality; Elastica, The Stone Roses, Menswear, Leftfield et al certainly seemed to struggle to recapture the fire of the debuts...
One of, if not the, best posts ever.
And may I refer the interested to the works of "America" - moon sausage a-plenty.
Emerson, Lake and Moon Sausage
It was, as you might expect, their final album...
wow
posted while i was typing my post. As someone once said
"A million housewives every day
pick up a can of beans and say
'what an amazing example of synchronisation.'"
Probably the most
understained record sleeve I owned as an adolescent. Was he pleased to see us, or was that just a moon sausage in Keith Emerson's pocket?
Welcome my friends
to the schlong that never ends
Yes.
Apparently it's guaranteed to blow your head apart and you can also rest assured that you'll get your money's worth
Fanfare for the common...
penis.
Porn...
Evil 9?
Ho' Down?
sorry
Brilliant original post
Two that immediately spring to mind:
Love Beach by Emerson Lake and Palmer, the awfulness of which I think I've written about on here before
Everything Must Go - Steely Dan. Why the genii of Becker and Fagen decided to reform and produce muzak imitations of their peerless 70s work is one of the great mysteries of our age.
Everything Must Go
is a fantastic album. The lyrics alone are worth the price of admission.
Some smart alec
Will point out this album is on Spotify. But instead I will do so...8-}
http://open.spotify.com/album/2d87FrFfritnZKbRO7BhpJ
psst. I *heart* you Backwards7. You are truly, er, Massive.
Backwards7
is a writer whose words I seek out at any given opportunity.
Outstanding, as ever.
TD
Jim Morrison's premature death might have robbed us
of a truly ghastly record but it didn't stop him and his mates from foisting "The Soft Parade" on us - even if it did have a couple of decent tracks on it ("Touch Me" is a rollicking tune and "Wishful Sinful" is lovely). It's not synths and drum machines but it's orchestras and brass and like nothing else in the band's canon.
Terrific post: I'd give it 2 up arrows if I could!
Although surely trumped by Jim's from-beyond-the-grave classic
'American Prayer' which from memory contains the immortal 'Ode To My Cock'. This passes the 'one excellent track' test too in that it has a great version of Roadhouse Blues.
Thank you.
An exceptional, unpretentious, and thoroughly satisfying read in so many ways.
To your list, I would humbly add "It's Hard" by The Who, from 1982, which features four superannuated pillheads dressed up as sweaty, over-bronzed New Romantics hovering discomfitingly close to a pubescent boy in an amusement arcade.
That's what the cover looks like as well.
My favourite line: "People are suffering, I'll say it again; people are suffering".
It's hardly "Boris The Spider", is it?
And the song which conforms to the
"one corker" rule would be Eminence Front:
Dirty Work
by the Stones is, I would say, their Moon Sausage album. Terrible cover with the boys pretending to be members of Duran Duran, mostly terrible songs fleshed out with horrific 80's production, Mick n' Keef at each other's throats throughout the recording, but hey, they had to make the album because they had to make album.
One Corker
Status Quo - Don't Stop
1. Band looking distraught in suits and ties on the cover. Two of them with severe anal pains.
2. Brian May hauled in for a Stickibackplastocaster solo on Buddy Holly's "Raining in My Heart" (perhaps following some vigorous Green Room bonding at Live Aid).
3. The title track is indeed the hit by the somewhat-more-successfully-self-reinvented Fleetwood Mac, which has been dragged, kicking and screaming "No, do stop!", into the "inimitable" tumty-tumty Quo style.
4. The viscous smear of reverb on the drums throughout the album is such that the cymbals sound uncannily like an array of dripping-pipe sound effects from a minor Alien sequel.
5. And here it is!
Archie
Are you deliberately hiding Carcass song titles in your posts?
Severe Anal Pains? Vicious Smear Of Reverb? Tumty Tumty Quo Style? Minor Alien Sequel?
Carcass
I have a brilliant anecdote about them when on tour with Bodycount.Can't do it justice on here because it involves Yorkshire accents and a Death Metal style voice.
Archie-Spot on Mate. It's the worst album ever made. Contains the crime that is "Fun,Fun,Fun"
Severe Anal Pains
"Three more from them later on..."
Excellent post, wonderfully written
I should like to nominate 60s icon Bob Dylan, and his 1986 offering Knocked Out Loaded: terrible cover, one excellent track ('Brownville Girl'), and shockingly poor and extremely dated production. But still I have developed a strange fondness for it - although 'They Killed Him' is quite frankly unlistenable.
Honourable mention to Joni Mitchell's Dog Eat Dog from 1985. More evidence for the theory that it wasn't punk saw off the rock dinosaurs, it was the Fairlight and the syn-drum.
Can I raise you Empire Burlesque?
Plastic production values (tick) and one nugget(Dark Eyes - tick). But the real crime is how Dylan managed to get from the wonderful take of "When the Night..." from Bootleg Series 1-3 to this mulch:
Yup another cheesy video
Empire Burlesque was my reserve choice
Big mistake to bring in Arthur Baker on production/post-production duties. Most of the 'pre-glossed' versions are superior to the final product.
Very smelly run..
Not forgetting these belters?
Down in the Groove
Real Live
Dylan and The Dead
Bonus output - Hearts on Fire
1985 - 1986
was his busiest year ... sadly.
I was at the Slane gig that features (a bit) on Real Live so I have a soft spot for it but sentiment aside fairly dire.
The album 'Dylan And The Dead' has the distinction
of being the worst album by both parties.
Down In The Groove
Say what you like about the rest of it, but his version of Rank Strangers To Me is rather lovely.
Death Is Not The End
is also a great song. Not done justice by Bob but by Gavin Friday: http://www.last.fm/music/Gavin+Friday/_/Death+is+Not+the+End
Great post.
I too love the old Moon Sausage. As a Dylan fan there are plenty to choose from, though the song and video for Tight Connection To My Heart really does it for me.
Basically I love the whole rockers-go-disco subgenre from the late 70s with Rod Stewart wearing well, Kiss being made for loving you and even Pink Floyd joining in with Another Brick In The Wall - the first emodisco anthem. There's not many 60's/70s bands who got through the just-add-synths 80s unscathed with no taint of changing their sound or chasing bucks. AC/DC are the only one I can think of, maybe JJ Cale.
I was about to suggest yer man George Ivan Morrison
but then I remembered this:
http://www.123video.nl/playvideos.asp?MovieID=531011
He claimed at the time he jumped at the chance to duet with one of his childhood heroes. This may well be the case but a cynic would sy that it was a shameless bid to appeal to a new demographic.
Toe-curling
The stars of the Loving Spoonful, the Byrds, The Rascals and The Ronettes "get it together".
Just citing the year in which this takes place causes toes to instantly curl: 1986.
Watching this without shielding your eyes in horror from time to time is practically impossible.
That
may be the worst thing I've ever seen
Holy Shit!
*
Sweet Jesus!
That was just...relentlessly shite. And poor Richard Manuel, on his day the best singer out of that lot, just looks confused and doesn't even get his own little "I made some good records once...remember?" montage. For shame.
Astonishing! I'd never have
Astonishing! I'd never have guessed something like that could exist.
The "dance routine" at about 3.20 actually caused me to gasp aloud!
And that harmonica...oh, the humanity!
Richard Manuel
And that was the year he killed himself. It's desperately sad to think how far that clip is from his best stuff.
Wait - Isn't That
Felix Cavaliere (from the Young Rascals)? Richard Manuel was not in any of the bands cited. In any case, sheer horror!
Yikes!
The Unravelling Wilburys.
I think I have a problem with my laptop...
... here in the office. Presumably the issue is with the video card as all videos work fine for the first 2 minutes or so, then it's as if every third frame has been removed and it gets very jerky.
It is very possibly because of this problem that the above video was viewable for the entire 4:24. Well, apart from the line dancing routine.
Christ...
Why? Why?
I tip my titfer to you sir.
Absolutely wonderful.You really should be writing for your supper.A delight from beginning to end.
On the premise
that there must be an exception to every rule I remember this being pretty good when I heard it in a shop in the states many years ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_from_Rio
I need to check it out on Spotify. Great post though.
backwards:
You are the Massive equivalent of a National Treasure.
I'm insanely fond
of Lace & Whiskey (1977) and also Flush The Fashion (1980) by Alice Cooper...both classic moon sausages.
Flush The Fashion
contains this absolute stonker of a song from "the wilderness years" (ie between all that was great about Alice and the pantomime that began around the time of "Poison" (still in shock from a conversation with a colleague some years ago who'd never heard of Schools Out, or at least didn't recognise it as Alice Cooper))
Pain
http://open.spotify.com/track/0th4zegIiQLsFdXcP5oZJc
Top Stuff, Backwards
What a fantastic post! 'Moon sausage' is henceforth my preferred term for all such recordings.
May I nominate Mr Bowie and the farty, synthy misery that is 1984's 'Tonight'. Leavened only by the rather splendid 'Blue Jean'.
No ...er.. love for this?
There is from over here
Loving the Alien is beautiful, especially in its full 7-8 minute version. Blue Jean is good, and so is Dancing With The Boys. Three good songs on one of his worst albums, that's not bad going is it. I'd say Never Let Me Down is his closest to a Moon Sausage, though even that has two decent songs (title song and Time Will Crawl), plus a cover of an obscure Iggy Pop song, Bang Bang, that the critics hated but I rather enjoyed.
I'm surprised nobody's commented on this bit
That's friendship, isn't it. Think I've got something in my eye.
Bravo
I'd like to join the chorus of approval for this excellent post. 'Moon Sausage' deserves a place in the language of popular culture, like 'Jump the Shark'.
Jefferson Airplane > Jefferson Starship > Starship
I still can’t get my head around the fact that the band that once sang “I’d rather have my country die for me” ended up soundtracking Mannequin. Let’s be honest, Mannequin is terrible. I can just about accept the idea of a shop dummy coming to life as Samantha from Sex and the City (it was the eighties, after all), but don’t expect me to care about the cutthroat world of professional window dressers.
Mind you, We Built This City is ace though.
That's no moon sausage...
In between their glory days of bashing the Nixon Administration through the medium of acid rock and their latter years, singing of the love between a man and a shop dummy, Jefferson Starship seemingly did a lot of songs about space. This set them up as an ideal “special musical guest” for The Star Wars Holiday Special.
Now, much has been written about this 97 minute (but feels a lot longer) toy advert slash variety show slash psychological torture from 1978, so I hardly need to get into it here, suffice to say that it has to be seen to be believed, but you’ll wish you hadn’t bothered.
Appearing as a pink hologram, the band perform as a distraction for the Imperial officers (and Art Carney), who obviously like a bit of a groove to murky 70s rock during downtime. Marty Balin is singing into what I presume is intended to be a lightsaber, but it resembles a flourescent dildo. At least they make the effort, wearing swishy costumes, twirling drumsticks, and generally pulling shapes while their instruments (including the fantastically futuristic keyboard on a shoulder strap) emit sonic waves (or something). The song features a spoken interlude about “The Great God Kopa Khan”, and cries of “Cigar shaped object”! I can’t be certain but I’m sure that’s not canon.
Psychedelic siren Grace Slick is nowhere to be seen in the performance. She had actually been fired from the band earlier in the year for drunkenly goading German audiences by shouting “who won the war?” while she should have been singing Somebody To Love for the 30,000th time. Nice one Grace. At least she was spared the embarrassment of appearing in the one part of the Star Wars franchise that is deemed too bad to ever get an official release.
Zappa..
okay, he did fantastic albums and patchy ones, but my moon sausage candidate is 1982's Man from Utopia. Not that anything particularly different was happening than usual, the band are tight, Zappa is droll. No, there's just an utter lack of charm to the whole proceedings, right down to the (even for him) rather obscene Jazz Discharge Party Hats and the vaffanculo (up your ass, I think, in Italian)cover. No nuggets on there either but here's the thing: it's not unplayable, just needs a clenched-buttocks type of mood.
And you, backwards7, are a gentleman and a hero.
this
is true, on both counts
zappa's moon sausage.....
.......is surely "Francesco Zappa". No FZ compositions, just those of someone with not quite the same name from the olden days played by an unweildy eighties computer device whose name escapes me.
Why?
Synclavier...
I was never altogether convinced the whole 'Francesco Zappa' thing wasn't an elaborate hoax. Even though there's references to him across the Interweb I'm still not 100% convinced - it's just too much of a coincidence.
There is work to do:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/add.php?word=moon+sausage
Nineteen Eighties Urgh.....
McCartney too had a few 'moon sausage' moments but contriving to make a rock 'n' roll covers album ('The Russian Album') sound like it was recorded in 1987 is now, and was at the time, quite astonishing and a million miles away from Gene Vincent and Little Richard.
Twelve years later and 'Run Devil Run' was a fabulous record and worthy of those two greats.
Strange isn't it?
There was a documentary on Paul in 1986 or 1987 (I'd give you the exact date if it had been the 60s) and he plays 'Press' in the studio and it is fabulous, yet the production on the released record is unbearable.
Didn't people notice this in the record industry in the mid-1980s?
I have to say that I thought the 1980s were dire at the time and heard 'moon sausage' in pretty much everything recorded.
Was it a reaction against the wonderful production of the 60s?
It was the sudden availability of lots of new digital toys
which allowed engineers to easily do stuff that had previously been impossible or even unthinkable.
Show an engineer a new effect and he will use it. This was fine when there was one new effect every year (remember how phasing was all over everything in 1967?) but when the pro-audio gear suppliers were producing new digital boxes every 5 minutes and they all did new things, it got a bit out of hand.
Remember also, that this was the time when digital recording came on the scene. Suddenly a recording could be endlessly polished and revisited without worrying about generational degredation of sound or master tape wear.
The combination of the ability to tinker forever and a big stack of new effects and processing techniques was a deadly mix.
I think that was the
documentary fronted by Richard Skinner? Great programme, I still have it on VHS somewhere I think.
Around the same time the Whistle Test followed the making of the new Genesis record of the time, Invisible Touch, including bits of them working on material which sounded great. By the time it came out, it was an album that included some very good Genesis songs rendered horrible by that production.
yeah but
Moon sausage may be a musically-criminal work, but Nash's lyrics have always been cringeworthy.
Coltrane on the Moon (Sausage)
Mister 7, had I a hat I would doff it to you: that was a truly fine piece of rock-writing, and "Moon Sausage" deserves to pass into the vernacular, wherever two or more music-obsessives gather to debate the most dreadful albums of all time. I agree with the sentiment that it should be printed in The Word at the earliest opportunity, possibly as a "guest column"? We've given the man our praise, now let's give him the going rate for a guest column - a crispy fiver, perchance?
My nomination for Moon Sausagehood would be John Coltrane's dreadful, dreadful "Ascension". On the cover, against a plain white background the great man sits perched on a stool, clutching his instrument and gazing meaningfully off into the middle distance. On the disc we find but two tracks: 40 minutes of "Ascension (Edition I)" and 38 minutes of "Ascension (Edition II)". Already, the clamour of alarm bells sounds, but fails to drown out the sonic horror that awaits. There is no beat. There is no groove. "Tune" is an alien concept here. What ensues is nearly 80 minutes of screeching, honking atonality which goes nowhere, but takes its time going there. I went back to the reviews in the jazz guides. Five stars. Check the title... yup. Check the catalogue number... yup, match. I read the reviews more closely: talk of "strikingly abrasive sheets of horn interplay", "discordant and abrasive skronks", and the clincher "this can be a difficult listen at first". And, dear reader, I sat through all 80 minutes of this, hanging on to that glimmer of hope offered by the words "at first" in that last phrase. As the disc ended, I felt I had come to the end of time, having spent an eternity being randomly parped and honked at.
I had never thrown a CD in the bin before. Now I have.
We used to play that in the shop on Friday afternoons
to empty it. Never failed.
I have that, love it to bits
Mind you I was given it for gratis by someone with the same opinions as the above gents. If you have any more free jazz you intend throwing out there is a welcome in the hillsides.
I like it too..
for the intensity. The melodious Trane you can find on other albums, say, Ballads.
After Egg Friday
and now Moon Sausage, I imagine Richard Bacon is quaking in his boots.
ZZ Top - Texan trend-buckers
Possibly the unlikeliest lot to update and redefine themselves in the 80s wilderness were the ZZs. Gear-shifting from gnarly, beardy, blues 'n' boogie cultists to international MTV stars, with perma-play singles and lorry-bothering records sales. Who'd a seen that coming?
Lou Moons Ya!
How about Lou Reeds fairly execrable Mistrial from the halcyon year 1986. Between the drum machine, the "rap" song and the hermetically sealed interplay with Fernando Saunders, this is a mostly painful listen. Easily Lou's moon sausage moment!
What about Dylan?
There is a place in my heart that will be forever reserved for Dylan's execrable Self Portrait album. I remember getting the treasured vinyl home and playing it and trying to convince myself that there was something there that I was missing. There wasn't - and I wasn't.
The noise in the background of Dylan crooning Blue Moon on this album is of an empty barrel being scraped.
Jimmy Page and Paul Rodgers
Unquestionably seminal figures in Rock. Some even say the finest exponents of their respective arts.
Put them together in the 80s and what do you get? Yup, pure Moon Sausage.
Loved the post B7 - and these lines especially
"...I glanced at the cover and instinctively knew that it would be one of the worst records ever committed to tape, and for this reason I would enjoy it immensely."
Iggy's Sausage...
"Blah Blah Blah", some great songs hidden underneath a terribly dated 80's high-tech production including that really annoying thing with the vocals going all up and down and wobbly, not sure on the technical term for this but Sigue Sigue Sputnik did it.
Have to add my admiration for the original post too - would like to see Backwards and the good Captain employed at Word Towers, would gladly pay to read their posts!