🎩🍾 You survived 2024. That is the baseline criteria for success nowadays. You're here! So I'm hosting a little simulated soirée online this Friday night to celebrate.
🎩🍾 #Jazz, #BigBand, #SwingHouse, #ElectroSwing, #ChapHop, #ChapStep, #SkiffleHouse, #AcidRagtime, #OldJackSwing, #AbsintheHouse, #VDM (#VintageDanceMusic) and affiliated decadent delicacies shall be played for your rug-cutting pleasure!
🎩🍾 Tune in Friday 3 Jan 2025, 6pm Central US time at slipmat.io/phoole, mixcloud.com/live/phoole, & twitch.tv/phoole!
🎩🍾 The CADDY OF CROSSED DESTINIES will be present, containing almost a dozen different decks of oracle cards, tarot cards, and other cards displaying fates, fortunes, futures, fancies, or figments, depending on your Phoolosophy. Cards will be drawn for tuner-inners - do with their dooms as you will! The Magic 8-Ball is also ready to deliver answers to yes-or-no questions.
Patrons in the Phoole Patreon Platoon (patreon.com/phoole) got an essay about the CADDY OF CROSSED DESTINIES last Spring, heralding Phoole & the Gang's IDES OF MARCH 2024 show, as excepted and paraphrased below.
The Caddy of Crossed Destinies?
I don't know what to call this.
I have this robin's-egg-blue plastic sorter that has, in the past, held cleaning supplies, then nothing, then sewing tools, then nothing.
I am susceptible to objects that are marketed as 'organizers.' Like, I'm a Level-7 Susceptible (<- a joke which might be only for Sascha Wiebenson, but if you smiled, make yourself known, fellow Human Being). I procure them when I am weak and overwhelmed, at life's random mercy. Office supplies fall into this category of pacifying procurement as well.
As my collapse-consciousness has expanded, and my consumerism has contracted, I buy these things less and less often, but this one resulted from a hapless trundle into a TJ Maxx (UK Patrons, over here, TK Maxx is called TJ Maxx, and it has a much bigger makeup and personal care section; otherwise it's pretty much the same) when I 'needed' something dumb and plastic to distract me from life on earth in the 21st century.
Phoole & the Gang divination, such as it is, involves letting tuner-inners and Phooligans who enjoy the show in its archived form use me as their oracle, or card-picker, picking a single card from one of multiple tarot decks, the School of Thought logical fallacy/cognitive bias deck, or Roger von Oech's Creative Whack Pack, which has been buried in a desk drawer lo these many years and has been excavated solely for the Ides.
And then, you know, I tell you what the card is, and if it's an Edward Gorey Fantod card, or the Artist Deck, or the Music Deck, or the Logic deck, or the Whack Pack, I tell you what the card means; if it's the Labyrinth tarot or the Ship of Fools tarot, you interpret it for yourself.
This seems convoluted enough to stress me out to the absolute limit! What do you think?
Dealing with multiple decks of cards of entirely different sizes (no more than two decks I own are the same dimensions, at all) is a crazy-making time. Cards are slippery. You can't just set a bunch of decks of cards on a flat surface and expect them to not slide off onto the floor, especially when you bump into the table a lot, and you flail your arms around like a wacky waving proton-particle tentacle droid all the time. I do these things.
But the blue plastic caddy turned out to be just the right size for all these disparate card decks! Some of its compartments are wider, for the big bois, and some are teeny, for the Fantod and Logic decks. I can easily pull a card from the decks without knocking everything over.
I just feel like I should name the thing, and all of my ideas for naming it sound like things made up by Elizabeth Carroll and Melissa Tropp, when they were the Aunties Credenza, working for me at Bristol all those years ago. They invented an oracle called the Sticks of Fate. Must have been in 1998, the first year I was a director. They were washer-women characters, but mainly they were matchmakers and determiners of mischievous pastimes, and also Sticks of Fate oracles. The Sticks of Fate were...tongue-depressors. It's what they were. 'Craft Sticks,' the hobby stores have since re-named the things. Half of them had the beginnings of fates on them, and the other half had the ends of fates on them, and you would pick one of each at random, and they would read them to you, and hilarity would result. It's the sort of nonsense one craves.
Anyhow, I thought I would call this box the Box of Fate, but, yeah, that is too Credenza.
Caddy of Crossed Destinies is an Italo Calvino reference - The Castle of Crossed Destinies is his post-mod inversion of the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales with tarot cards as the MacGuffin. I'm not 100% sold on it as a name for this box.
Tray of Probabilities
Potentials Selection
Quantum Assortment
Puzzler Pile
Oracles, but Not the Evil Software Behemoth
Every Day I'm Shufflin'
Fate Sorter
Randomizer Arsenal
Rack of Reflection
Drawer of Doom
Hazard Holder
Calamity Caddy
BlightBox
Tote of Totality (courtesy Tiffany)
Portable Random Oracles of Potential Reflection or PROoPR (courtesy Jestr2)
No idea. Maybe it's best to just not refer to it. What do you think I should call it?
I have included the Artist deck, the Music deck, the Logic deck and the Whack Pack for Phooligans who are just eeeeehhhhhh about woo - who might not be engaged solely by the trappings of MaGiCaL aMuSeMeNtS and want a less-irrational option or two. I mean, for me, personally, all of it is simply a helpful tool to suggest to my brainhole that it think about something it hasn't thought about lately, or think about things in a different way. Card-consultancy is a brain randomizer - a Pop-O-Matic Bubble for a head, if you will.
Digression: I used to run around with a very hilarious chap who invented a character for a role-playing game who was a 'superhero,' I guess, who happened to have a Pop-O-Matic Bubble for a head. Jigginz knows. The character's exploits led to the proliferation amongst our milieu of the catchphrase, "If you roll boxcars, you go shithouse," the exact meaning of which was deliberately vague, but the implication of which was delectably violent.
I should probably add a Pop-O-Matic bubble to my Randomizer Arsenal. Have I decided to call it that? Not quite. I await the produce of your brainstorms. Also, why is there not a Pop-O-Matic helmet? WHY IS THERE NOT. Someone ought! I would wear one every day.
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